Before little magazines, there were "ephemeral bibelots"

Otherwise known as "freak magazines," they cast the die for the 20th century's small presses.

The Green Sheaf, Issue 5, 1903.

In an 1897 editorial, the Boston Evening Transcript declared that a current spate of “small and saucy magazines,” known as “ephemeral bibelots,” tended to wink out of existence after a few issues. Why? Because they trucked “simply on account of the brillancy of their names”: The Bauble, The Black Book, The Buzz-Saw, The Dwarf, The Fad, The Fly-Leaf, The Lark, The Magpie, Miss Blue-Stocking, Paragraphs, Potpourri, The Red Letter, The Quest, The Shadow, The Skeptic, The Skeptic, and The Wet Dog.

It’s sad that we’ll never get to read back issues of The Wet Dog, but perhaps we still bask in its influence. Ephemeral bibelots, and the artists that produced them, cast the die for modern counterculture, specifically little magazines, and later, zines. As the back cover of Brad Evans’ Ephemeral Bibleots: How an International Fad Buried American Modernism explains:

Emanating from the cabarets of modernist Paris, a short-lived vogue spread around the world for avant-garde journals known in English as "ephemeral bibelots." For a time, it seemed that all the young bohemians passing through Paris started their own bibelots modeled on Le Chat Noir, the esoteric magazine of the famed Montmartre cabaret. These journals were recognizable for their decadence, campy queerness, astounding art nouveau illustrations, fin-de-siècle color schemes, innovative typefaces, and practiced bohemianism.

We like to think that the punk movement pioneered the culture of edgy music + underground clubs + tiny handmade publications, but Le Chat Noir did it first. That generation of artists also pioneered the snarky/absurdist/nihilist attitude that we associate with modern counterculture.

Prior to the existence of Le Chat Noir — the newspaper and the cabaret — poet Émile Goudeau produced L’Hydropathes, a newspaper publishing the work of writers and artists who hung out at the Café de la Rive Gauche and the Grand Pinte. Later, Goudreau opened a cafe, Cercle des Hydropathes, on Rue Cujas. French Theory explains the peculiar name:

In fact, it all started with a schoolboy pun on the name of the club’s president and the place where its members found refuge. Hydropathes in French refers to people who hate water or whom it makes ill: Goudeau sounds like the “taste of water,” whereas Hôtel Boileau sounds like “drink water.” Perhaps the name is also an ironic nod towards their penchant for boozy conversations; some experts suggest that it is perhaps a tribute to a German waltz, whereas other people, such as the illustrator Samuel Eckert, think that it is in fact a reference to an animal with a scaly body and lots of legs.

An issue of L’Hydropath featuring Emile, Cohl, father of the animated cartoon. (Public Domain)

The club closed its doors after an unknown so-and-so lit a bunch of literal fireworks behind the building. Goudeau moved on to The Black Cat — the cabaret and the journal —  but before he did that, he printed an eye-goggling 780 issues of L’Hydropathes.

There are dozens of other ephemeral journals that time’s forgotten, including bibelots published in other parts of Europe, primarily England. That includes The Dial (no, not that one); The Yellow Book (named to evoke racy French novels sold with yellow covers); The Pagan Review; and The Pageant. Toronto University’s Center for Digital Humanities hosts PDF scans of these magazines, and gives some historical context to them at Yellow Nineties.

(Via Yellow Nineties)

An open-source site created by scholars, Yellow Nineties includes a mapping of the people involved in the English small press scene of the late 19th century, including Henry Salt (full name: Henry Shakespear Stephens Salt) author of Animals’ Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892), and Pamela Colman Smith, best known as the artist behind the The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck. The RWS is the best-selling deck of all time; most modern decks are based on its imagery.

But in 1903, Colman-Smith edited her own literary journal, The Green Sheaf. Unlike the decadent and absurdist journals coming out of bohemian Paris, Colman Smith’s magazine had a dreamy, otherworldly look and drew on Celtic mythology and mysticism for inspiration. As artist John Coulthart writes:

This was a slight publication—the first number is a mere 8 pages—but the contents included heavyweight contributors such as John Masefield together with Smith’s mystically-oriented Irish friends, WB Yeats and “AE” (George Russell). Smith provided many of the illustrations, as did Cecil French and William Horton, the latter an artist whose work I hadn’t seen in colour before. All the colouring in The Green Sheaf was done by hand, presumably by Smith herself, which must have limited the circulation. Smith’s intention was to publish 13 issues a year, and 13 issues were all the magazine eventually managed. The number 13 was evidently an important one for the artist/editor, although we’re left to guess why. In addition to 13 issues, the subscriptions sold for 13 shillings, with individual issues costing 13 pence each.

You can download PDFs of The Green Sheaf at Yellow Nineties or at Archive.org; a view of each issue in flip-book format is a delight, if for nothing other than the jewel-toned illustrations (as Coulthart mentions, all hand-colored) which are familiar in style to anyone who’s shuffled through a RWS Tarot deck.

If you are now as obsessed as I am by these weird little publications, Rutgers University (whose press published Brad Evans’ book), maintains an archive of research into ephemeral bibelots, including lots of images. You can also find PDFs of other journals at the Modernist Journals Project, including copies of the mysterious Dilettante (“the magazine’s publisher and editor never disclosed their identity, no important works or influential authors ever appeared in its pages, and few hard copies of the magazine survive today”).

“As long as the desire to see one's own writings in print lasts there will be bibelots, but the 'fad magazine' in literature moves on long tides, one of which is now ebbing away. The collectors may mourn, but literature will have little to regret in the decline of the ephemeral bibelot,” snarked the Boston Evening Standard in an 1897 editorial. The only interesting thing for future students of literature and history, it said, would be the peculiar names: “The Black-Book, The Chap-Book, The Clack-Book, The Chop-Book, The Hour-Book, The Yellow-Book ... [and] the variations that made the newsdealers’ a menagerie of strange animals, where the black cat, the purple cow, the magpie, the owl, the gray goose, the wet dog, the white elephant, the white rabbit and the yellow kids dwelt side-by-side like a happy family.”

Skydiving Paper Cows

Speaking of mengeries and small pubs, apparently there was, at some point, a zine called Skydiving Paper Cows. We don’t call them bibelots anymore, but little magazines live on, some more ephemerally than others.

Thomas and I know all about that: in the early aughts, we published, along with our pal Andrea Avery Durway, a little magazine called 52nd City. Last week, music writer Randall Roberts posted his brillant piece, “A Rag for William S. Burroughs,” which we published in our Faith issue. It’s nice when the formerly ephemeral floats back into the collective, right? The piece is a great read and went out via his Substack, Li’l Edit Yard Sale, which I heartily recommend.

Merci B.

Shoutouts and thanks to new subscribers A.G., Kathy D., Rose C., Mountain Standard Time, Randy R., Steve J., Val G., and Bobby L. (who I don’t think I gave a proper shout-out to in a prior missive, my apologies). Halloween is nigh, and I hope you find people in your town who enjoy celebrating it as much as the folks in New Orleans. Last weekend we went to a poetry reading, and before they read a word, the poet (who’s from Houston) exclaimed, “Damn! Y’all really love your Halloween, don’t you?” (Yes, we do.) Cheers ‘til next week, post-zombie/skeleton/witch season.