NLW 1000: From one to a thousand

Abstract

A thousand is a good old age; even Methuselah failed to achieve it. It is even a good age for a journal. I have spent many a happy hour in the Cambridge University Library's department of dead periodicals and I know that those that have failed to achieve the present magic number are indeed many. James Duff Brown did better than he knew when, in July 1898, his new sixpenny monthly found its way into the libraries. Its pre‐history also is not without interest but as I discussed this in fair detail in LW 800 (February 1967) and subsequently in James Duff Brown (pp 51–58) a few sentences of summary may now suffice. JDB founded LW primarily to assure himself of a continuing and regular journalistic medium on the justified assumption that MacAlister's Library was unlikely to remain the LA ‘organ’ after 1898 and that Henry Guppy (1861–1948) as volunteer editor of the projected new LAR was most unlikely to offer him comparable scope. For by 1894 JDB had become MacAlister's right‐hand man for the public library side of the Library; after 1894, when the open access revolution began in Clerkenwell, he had also become a very controversial one. It is far from easy now to visualise a state of affairs in which public library readers were not themselves admitted to the shelves. Nevertheless, the early libraries issued books only on request and after they had been found by members of the staff. Civil wars frequently follow revolutions and the open access one was no exception; until his death in 1914 JDB faced much well‐entrenched opposition.