Looking at the rows of Nuggets that lined up briefly on the shelves, there was no sense of wonder and anticipation, more a sense of gloom at their condition and the variability of work. Much of the visual work was limp in humour and poor in execution. It was a pale and leaden thing until you began to look beyond the shredding bulk to examples of originality on the page. I doubt much was commissioned beyond repeated features such as the Hooligan and Worms' Eye Views. It had nothing of the sustained visual excellencies of Simplicissimus or Meggendorfer's Blatter.

Yet there are visual propositions scattered through the issues of Nuggets I had seen nowhere else, some reflecting issues of the day, some inventing new ways of drawing things.