When a magazine folds after a handful of issues there are usually just a few reasons why:
1) The editor dies and no replacement can be found
2) The financial backing dries up
3) There are too few new contributions in hand
4) No-one buys the magazine.
5) The magazine is really not that good
In the case of The First Edition and Book Collector, which expired after just two issues in the autumn of 1924, the latter was probably the reason. The only redeeming features of this real stinker of a first issue are Thomas Hardy’s first publication, a short story that was first published in 1865, and some wonderful black and white illustrations by Alan Odle, a genuine heir to the mantle of Aubrey Beardsley. But even the genius of Odle cannot save this one.
The First Edition and Book Collector begins with utter tosh and ends with it. The magazine purports to be focussed on the collection of first editions, but what do we get in this first issue? We get two opening pages on why the editor, one H.D.Clevely, doesn’t care too much for poets and novelists who dress like analytical chemists or rent collectors and who write adverts for liver pills (no names given), and who is quite capable of arguing that poets should leave their intellect behind and grow long hair in order to engage with human emotion. Later on, the same author contributes an eleven page story which has nothing whatsoever to do with first editions or even book-collecting, though it does give reign to a nasty brand of anti-Semitism.
There follows two further pages that begin promisingly with some sort of sense—in which the writer divides bibliophiles into collectors and accumulators. He then spoils it all by stating categorically that ‘book collecting is probably the most inexpensive form of artistic recreation in the world ‘.He then goes on to claim that books are cheap ( compared with what ?) and produces a classic piece of false logic :‘ first editions are just as cheap as any other books; therefore when they come out is the time to buy them’( my italics).
It gets worse-- far worse. Again, we are treated to another two pages of hokum, this time on ‘the condition of books ‘.The writer begins reasonably enough , before his little brain gets overheated and he develops a familiar rant. Adopting the authoritative tone of someone who has run an antiquarian bookshop for four decades, we get this planet-sized generalisation:’ the majority of old books are quite worthless ‘.
