John Macfarlane tells The Globe he found The Walrus teetering, but now it is on solid ground

John Macfarlane

It's a natural story for the Saturday Globe and Mail: a retrospective look at the career of John Macfarlane as he comes to the recently-announced resignation of his editorship of The Walrus. The story in tomorrow's Globe by James Adams asks Macfarlane to select examples from his career and comment on favourite or significant issues.

Among the most interesting, though not surprising, is the choice of The Walrus's October 2013, its 10th anniversary issue, which he said was emblematic of the more secure circumstances of the magazine he's helped to turn around as co-publisher and editor (with co-publisher Shelley Ambrose) and why they can pursue a successor with confidence.

"We’ve established a business model that works. We’ve demonstrated that if you want to do a magazine like The Walrus in this country, you can’t make it viable with just circulation and advertising. The third leg of the stool is philanthropy and events: fundraising. 

"Five or six years ago, if Shelley had gone to somebody else and said, “We’d like you to edit the magazine,” that somebody likely already had a job, maybe a mortgage, maybe kids to educate, and he or she would have asked, “Will The Walrus be around in a year?” and Shelley couldn’t have looked that person in the eye and said, “Yes.” Now we can. Five or six years ago, we were pretty close to shutting the place down. Today we can look for an editor who has skills I don’t have and we’ll be able to say to that person, 'The Walrus will be here 10 years from now and we’ll be able to pay you what you’re worth.' ”

Rare trench magazines from First World War compiled into searchable database

On the eve of the centenary of the start of the First World War  next year, a "library of lost voices" is being compiled by ProQuest, made up of more than 1,500 periodicals created by and for servicemen in the armed forces of Canada, the U.S., France, Australia, and New Zealand.

The majority of these trench journals and unit magazines -- many of them highly "unofficial" -- that have survived originate from units based on the Western Front in France; there are also magazines from units serving on the Eastern Front, in Gallipoli, Palestine, Egypt, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, Britain and USA. They have been compiled from various collections, including those of the Imperial War Museums and the British Library. The result is a scanned, cover-to-cover resource of around 35,000 individual journal issues, amounting to roughly 500,000 pages.  The full-text, full image searchable database will be available for a fee (readers can register for a free trial.) Researchers should also be able to access them through public or university libraries who subscribe to ProQuest services.

The journals include infantry magazines from various regiments, such as the popular Canadian monthly The Dead Horse Corner Gazette, published by the 4th Battalion.  Others include The Howling Howitzer and The Kit-Bag, as well as magazines produced by prisoners of war in internment camps such as Prisoner's Pie and Knockaloe Lager-Zeitung and titles made in hospitals and aboard hospital ships such as The Iodine Chronicle and Happy Though Wounded.

[image: Canadian War Museum]

Air conditioning owes its start to a damp magazine

A cool magazine

In a sense, we have magazines to thank for air-conditioning which has been welcome in the recent heat wave gripping North America. I know I'm inclined to give magazines credit for a lot, but this time I have a story in the New York Times to back me up. And the paper says that Willis Carrier, the inventor of air conditioning, did it to allow a long-gone weekly magazine called Judge to be printed in the midst of a sticky Brooklyn summer in 1902. Apparently the sheetfed magazine's ink wouldn't dry and the pages would absorb humidity, ruining registration.

Junior engineer Willis Carrier -- who went on to the create the Carrier Corporation, well known for air conditioning and furnaces -- cooled the plant by forcing air across pipes filled with cool well water and later added a compressor-run refigerating machine to cool the pipes faster. Ultimately, he figured out even better ways that began to cool places like movie theatres and Madison Square Gardens.
[H/T to Alastair Cheng]

Wallow in covers with searchable site

A friend has pointed us to a fun and fascinating resource -- a site called Cover Browser, that was created in 2006 and has more than 450,000 searchable covers of comic books, pulp magazines and magazine covers for mavens to explore.

It's fun regardless of whether you see them as historical artifacts or reference for magazine design or just general interest. Even more amazing, the searchability is such that you can seek magazines alphabetically, at random or to match a particular pattern or seeks out the most popular or the best and worst 10 covers of all time. In some cases, clicking on a cover opens a fully readable issue of the magazine. [Note: a few of the covers are quite racy or racist reflections of their times, so keep the digitalis handy.]

American Heritage suspends publication

A venerable U.S. history magazine that was one of the few magazines that appeared originally in hardcovers (the other was Horizon), American Heritage -- owned by Forbes Inc., publishers of Forbes magazine -- has been suspended. According to a story in the New York Times, the magazine has been for sale since January and the June-July issue is "on hold" pending some resolution. American Heritage's website is being maintained for now.

The closest Canadian equivalent to American Heritage is The Beaver: Canada's National History Magazine, although that title is published by a not-for-profit foundation.

Current circulation is 350,000, the highest it has ever been. The original editor of the magazine was the famous Civil War historian Bruce Catton who wrote in the inaugural issue in December 1954 that “the faith that moves us is, quite simply, the belief that our heritage is best understood by a study of the things that the ordinary folk of America have done and thought and dreamed since first they began to live here.”

Originally, the magazine's founders refused to take advertising (finding a “basic incompatibility between the tones of the voice of history and of advertising”) — and instead charged a yearly subscription of $10, a figure so steep at the time that readers were allowed to pay it in installments. In its early years, it was published clothbound. It stayed hardback until 1980. In the mid-90s it was redesigned and repositioned to appeal to younger, boomer readers.

The magazine became a treasured collector's item and many back issues are still available in used book stores and online used book sites.

Editor Richard F. Snow said the magazine only began taking advertising reluctantly, in 1982. “We all felt very bad about taking advertising,” Mr. Snow recalled. “But it had the odd effect of making us feel we were in touch with the world. There was a sense of a living connection to a process that was actually sort of fun — or at least it was fun while we were getting ads.”

The NYT article said Snow gets to keep his Royal manual typewriter as part of his severance.

“That was the typewriter I was assigned in 1970, and it will follow me to the grave,” he said, and he added: “I wish this were more a sign of granitic stability, but in fact it’s a sign of my computer incompetence. I use it just to type labels, but it works beautifully. Every year someone comes in and cleans it. I don’t think he’s paid by Forbes. He’s some spectral presence who just turns up.”