A truth universally acknowledged: Jane Austen magazine needed a white knight

With the blizzard of gloomy news about magazines and the death of print, here's a heartening story. A sub-editor for the London Times, who is also an obituary writer for the Daily Telegraph, has saved Jane Austen's Regency World, a magazine all about the life and times of the author of Pride and Prejudice.

According to a story in UK Press Gazette, Tim Bullamore heard that the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, England was shutting the magazine down. There were few subscribers and even fewer ads. He struck a deal to buy the title (which remains the official publication of the Jane Austen Centre), and relaunched it.

“As a journalist I hate to see written publications having to close and I saw an awful lot of promise there. It was being run by really great people who didn’t have a magazine publishing background. They were going to close it and it only had a small number of subscribers and little advertising. We’ve already more than exceeded our targets in advertising for the first year and subscriptions on the way up."

The new-look September issue has been reduced somewhat from saddle-stitched standard size to perfect bound handbag-size and a redesign reduced the 40 different fonts used in the old magazine to just four. A new font has been created from samples of Jane Austen’s handwriting.

A number of celebrity or name writers have been recruited: former Prime Minister Sir John Major writing on cricket in Austen’s time and Daily Mail columnist Bel Mooney on how she has been inspired by Jane Austen.

The magazine has a circulation of around 1,000, with half of those in North America and Bullamore would like to see it double in circ in the next year. He said:

“There is a seemingly insatiable demand from both sides of the Atlantic – and indeed the whole English-speaking world – for information about the Regency era, and particularly about Jane Austen.”