Devonshire magazine Oct/Nov 2014: Goat Island

I've briefly mentioned East Devon Coast & Country magazine before; a few issues back it was rebadged as the Exeter, East & Mid Devon issue of the Devonshire magazine, part of the larger Prestige Media stable. It always impresses me as one of the very few of the glossy advertorial magazines with good-quality editorial content, usually on topographical/historical topics, and this month's was no exception.

New Scientist archived to 1989

Via MetaFilter: New Scientist.

MetaFilter reports that Google Books now has a searchable archive of full issues of the British science magazine New Scientist, from its November 1956 launch to December 1989.

For many (myself included) this will make for nostalgic reading; when I was at school doing sciences, subscription to New Scientist was standard. Its style decades ago was considerably more academic - it was not, as now, a popular-readership magazine about science, but more a magazine by scientists for scientists that assumed a degree of scientific literacy even in its general readership.

Even if you don't read the main articles, other highlights include the quaint adverts (such as this page from 8th January 1959 advertising the Curta mechanical calculator, W&F Faulkner's Ascot Gold Cut tobacco, and "making the most of lead"); Bill Tidy's Grimbledown Down strip, which satirised a research establishment; and David E. H. Jones's brilliant Ariadne column,which brought a weekly satirical look at the science world along with the scientific exploits of Ariadne's many-epitheted friend Daedalus and his fictional (but often only slightly implausible) inventions, such as a locomotive fuelled by grass harvested between the rails.

- Ray

The Harmsworth Monthly Pictorial Magazine

The previous post came from an early issue of the Harmsworth Monthly Pictorial Magazine, which looked worth further investigation. The magazine was launched late in 1898 out of the Amalgamated Press stable owned by Alfred Harmsworth. Here's its launch editorial:

OUR EXCUSE FOR THE ISSUE OF A SIXPENNY MAGAZINE AT THREEPENCE. SOME REASONS WHY.

The beginning of a new Magazine, once an event, is now so much a commonplace that the ancient excuse of the "long felt want" no longer serves.

In the days of the Nabobs, the gentle shaking of the Pagoda tree sufficed to bring great stores of wealth, but these be the times of the fallen rupee. Your modern Anglo-Indian toils out his existence for a bare pittance. And it is so in the making of Magazines. One hundred and fifty years ago the mere issue of the "Gentleman's" stirred to their depths the Coffee Houses and the Clubs, not only here in the Old Country, but in our North American Colonies as well.

Times are changed, alas! "The Harmsworth Magazine," though, indeed, it appeals to an English-speaking audience of over one hundred millions, will at best provoke a little favourable comment in the train and the library, for the Magazine field has been vastly exploited, and especially of late. A modern buyer of periodical publications rises as warily to a new lure as a twice-shot-over partridge to the gun.

The reader of Magazines has of late years been harried by a direct, by an enfilading, and a ricochetting fire of new adventures, some honestly and avowedly frivolous, others portentously literary, a few loftily artistic. Every imaginable plan has been adopted whereby his capture might be effected. Projectiles calculated to vanquish by size and weight of paper have been hurled at him; there have even been surreptitious and spy-like attempts to enter his domestic circle by seeking the favour of his wife and daughters by means of "Women's Departments," all frocks, furbelows, and complexion cures; and worse, his very children have been attacked by page on page of "Nursery Chat" and "Tiny Tales for Little Listeners."

Last straw of all, he has been patronised by the vast army of "Great Authors" of the period. And if the chit-chat of the press is to be believed there never were in Rome, in Athens, or in the days of Elizabeth herself, so many distinguished litterateurs as at present. The unfortunate victim has trembled at the solemn pomp of

'The editor of the 'Monster Magazine' has pleasure in announcing he has been so fortunate as to secure the masterpiece of Mr. ."

or,

"It is rumoured that Mr. . has been induced to enter into an agreement to contribute an important series of short stories to the "Monster Magazine" during the Spring of 1905. Mr. . is entirely occupied in the fulfilment of various contracts until that time."

It is "right here," as our American kinsmen have it, that "The Harmsworth Magazine" comes in.

Together with a great many other people, we came to the conclusion long since that a good deal of the literary wares that are foisted on the public by means of the ordinary advertising methods of personal paragraphs and "interviews" is mainly rubbish. Frankly and openly do we, therefore, declare that mere "names" will never command an entrance to the pages of this Magazine. As with our "Daily Mail" and our other journals, we shall rely on new writers. The public is weary of the reiteration of the same contributors to each of the monthly publications. He (and she) wants something new. It is our desire, for the sake of the public, for the benefit of young artists and others, and for our own profit, to avoid the productions of the professional "ring" of much advertised mediocrity which most assuredly dominates many of our Magazines to-day, though the work of really representative men and women will always be secured, without regard to its cost.

In selecting the price at which "The Harmsworth Magazine" should be issued to the British, Canadian, Australasian, South African, and Anglo-Indian public, we choose that of the two most distinguished journals in our language, "The Times" and "Punch."

Can such a publication as this be sold for 3d.? Provided we reach a gigantic circulation, we can do it. We are enabled to issue a threepenny Magazine containing more expensive literary matter, more numerous pictures, and more pages than the sixpenny Magazines of a few months back, at so ridiculous a price, because this Magazine is only a small incident in an organization controlling four daily journals and nearly thirty weekly periodicals; because we already possess and are now building printing machinery of an entirely novel and labour-saving nature.

The Magazine will be cheap as to price only. In every respect, save, perhaps, mere bulk, "The Harmsworth Magazine" will compete frankly, and without reserve, with older friends in the same field.

The experiment, largely due to a devoted band of workers, headed by my brother Cecil, is at least an interesting one. Will it succeed? Much depends upon the good word of those who read it. If it meets with your approval, if you consider that the enterprise is worthy of commendation, will you make our effort known to your circle?

Alfred C. Harmsworth.

The magazine was renamed the London Magazine in 1900, and continued in publication (renamed the New London Magazine in 1930) until 1933. Harmsworth, now better known as Lord Northcliffe, went on to an astonishingly influential career that combined innovative genius with jingoism, power-seeking and outright megalomania; he was the prime mover in creating the ethos of the modern tabloid newspaper empires.

The success of the Harmsworth Magazine isn't hard to understand; it's still extremely readable, combining fiction with quirky illustrated features. Issue 2 is online at Project Gutenberg (E-Text No. 29716) and includes:

• MY TRAVELLING COMPANION (fiction)
• A £10,000 TOY (Percy H Leigh's model railway)
• A UNIQUE EXPERIENCE AT THE SEASIDE (fiction)
• THE MEDICAL DETECTIVE AND HIS WORK (about forensic science)
• THE ONLY WHITE "ZOO" IN EXISTENCE (Lord Alington's 'White Farm' at Crichel containing only white animals)
• IN A DISAPPEARING CHESHIRE TOWN (subsidence in Northwich due to salt mining)
• THAT FIVE HUNDRED POUND PRIZE (fiction)
• THE MOST CRUEL SPORT IN THE WORLD (a feature on bullfighting)
• THE DESCENT OF REGINALD HAMPTON (fiction)
• THE MODERN MINIATURE CRAZE (miniature portraiture)
• TO KEEP THE DOGS DOWNSTAIRS (dog gates at Slyfield Manor)
• FAMOUS LONDON DOOR-KNOCKERS
• OUR MONTHLY GALLERY OF BEAUTIFUL AND INTERESTING PAINTINGS

Several volumes are accessible via Google Books (search result here) if you're in the USA or use a proxy server. Google finds other oddments; I especially liked If London Were Like Venice, a photo feature imagining a subsided London with canals instead of streets (see clickable index of illustrations).

- Ray

LabLit.com: breaking the stereotype

In the previous post I briefly mentioned LabLit.com: "the culture of science in fiction and fact". Edited by edited by scientist and science writer Dr. Jennifer Rohn, it's "dedicated to real laboratory culture and to the portrayal and perceptions of that culture – science, scientists and labs – in fiction, the media and across popular culture. The site is intended for non-scientists as well as scientists, and the goal is to inform, entertain and surprise".

It's an interesting mix. Some of it is polemical and actively targeting the stereotypes, as in What is Lab Lit (the genre)? ("Boffins are so last century - let's see some real scientists for a change"). But as the launch editorial explains, its scope includes essays, reviews, fiction and poetry - anything about the culture of real science, whether realistic science in fiction, analysis of unrealistic science in fiction, or and science fiction.

There's plenty here for literature enthusiasts: a quick look in the archives finds Science at sea, looking at Stephen Maturin in the novels of Patrick O'Brian; a very nice three-episode feature, Flights of Fancy, arguing how early novelists set the scene for space exploration; A culture of curiosity, concerning George Eliot, little known to be a keen botanist; and Thomas Hardy, Richard Proctor and the dialogue of the deaf, how two 19th century writers exemplified a cultural split that still persists.
-Ray

Ansible ... and Anglish

Science fiction readers won't need an introduction, but this may also be of interest to a general fiction readership: Ansible, the archive site for Dave Langford's long-running SF newsletter. One of its general-interest topics is "As Others See Us", its coverage of the antagonism from the literary circuit, where authors and reviewers will bend over backwards to portray literary works set in, say, imaginary futures, as something other than SF. For instance, Margaret Atwood, author of two post-apocalyptic novels, The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake, doesn't write SF, which she characterises as "talking squid in outer space". Other amusements include Thog's Masterclass, examples of bizarre or illogical writing (e.g. Neat Tricks Dept. "The animal ... opened two enormous lidless eyes") and Hazel's Language Lessons, interesting linguistic trivia.

The latter introduced me to the Dorset poet William Barnes who, apart from dialect poetry, conceived of a 'Pure English' expunged of Latin and French influences. Some of his coinages are very nice: Sunprint (photograph), bendsome (flexible), folkwain (omnibus), wortlore (botany), hairbane (depilatory), nipperlings (forceps) and welkinfire (meteor). There is a book with a glossary: The Rebirth of England and English, The Vision of William Barnes by Father Andrew Phillips.
      Barnes wasn't alone in advocating this Saxonism: another enthusiast was the composer Percy Grainger, who used in his letters and musical scores a similar 'Blue-Eyed English', in this case springing from a fairly eccentric racial stereotyping. Although Grainger's coinages were often as pleasant as those of Barnes - for instance, traingarth (railway station) and tonewright (composer) - those for more abstract concepts were seriously cumbersome. See, for example, Grainger's Top Ten - PDF - which mentions his terms such as puzzle-them gift-fulness (complexity) and tween-realm-some skill-hoard-fulness (international tradition).
      The author Poul Anderson and humorist Paul Jennings also played with the idea. The former wrote an 'Ander-Saxon' essay in atomic theory, Uncleftish Beholding in entirely Saxon-derived words. An atom is an uncleft, the word corresponding to its Latin root a-tomos, that which can't be divided. The latter wrote a series of articles in Punch in 1966, in a postulated 'Anglish' that might have developed if the Normans had lost the Battle of Hastings. - Ray

"In a foregoing piece (a week ago in this same mirthboke) I wrote anent the ninehundredth yearday of the Clash of Hastings; of how in that mightytussle, which othered our lore for coming hundredyears, indeed for all the following aftertide till Doomsday, the would-be imaginers from France were smitten hip and thigh; and of how not least our tongue remained selfthrough and strong, unbecluttered and unbedizened with outlandish Latin-born words of French offshoot. Our Anglish tongue, grown from many birth-ages of yeomen, working in field or threshing-floor, ringing-loft or shearing house, mead and thicket and ditch, under the thousand hues and scudding clouds of our ever-othering weather, has been emulched over the hundredyears with many sayings born from everyday life. It has an unbettered muchness of samenoiselike and again-clanger wordgroups, such as wind and water, horse and hound, block and tackle, sweet seventeen. The craft and insight of our Anglish tongue for the more cunning switchmeangroups, for unthingsome and overthingsome withtakings, gives a matchless tool to bards, deepthinkers and trypiecemen. If Angland had gone the way of the Betweensea Eyots there is every likelihood that our lot would have fallen forever in the Middlesea ringpath".

Bookworm Droppings

A small recommendation: The Book Guide, a very good resource on all aspects of secondhand books in the UK, has a page relating to Bookworm Droppings. Drawn from the book series of that name, it provides a few online examples of the strange interactions that take place between booksellers and customers. In the year or so I've been working in the bookshop in Topsham, I can't say I've had any spectacularly odd conversations, but a surprisngly large number of people do ask "do you sell books?" and similar.

- Ray