What We're Reading: January, 2024

Here are some articles that grabbed the attention of Magazines and Newspapers Center staff this month. It's a fun balance of cheerful articles, surprising reportage, and more developments in the realm of artificial intelligence, which is already affecting newspapers, magazines, and other online information sources. Resources are available with an SFPL card in most cases. 

Two Of a Kind

Apollo: The International Art Magazine, January 2024

Apollo's cover story talks about the final months in the life of the famous artist Vincent Van Gogh, when he was under the care of a doctor that was pretty similar to himself. Depressive and battling his own mental illness according to Van Gogh, Gachet was a patron of the arts, a collector, and an amateur print maker. As part of the treatment, Gachet prescribed Van Gogh to paint and accepted the artist's paintings as payment for his medical treatment. Gachet had a very impressive collection of paintings that he had amassed, and fifteen years after Van Gogh's death, Gachet loaned the two paintings in the image above—a portrait Van Gogh painted of Gachet and a Van Gogh self portrait—to a major retrospective of Van Gogh's work.   

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I Am Going to Miss Pitchfork, but That’s Only Half the Problem

New York Times, January 21, 2024

(Note: this opinion piece is linked as a gift article; you can set up your own free NYT access with a 72 hr access code to view website-only content. See instructions.) 

Another one bites the dust—this time Pitchfork is being folded into GQ—but opinion columnist Ezra Klein points out the bigger problem in journalism and media.

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Sports Illustrated’s Strange Merger

Bloomberg, January 23, 2024 

(Note: you might need to create a free account on Bloomberg to read this article. Our apologies that we're not able to link this one through SFPL resources.)

Levine gets down to the convoluted financial reasons that contributed to Sports Illustrated publishing AI-generated stories on its website last year. Less convoluted will be the webinar we host next week featuring Maggie Harrison Dupré, journalist at Futurism.com, who broke the original story of the AI pieces on the SI site. Read Levine's piece and join us on Feb. 9 at 11 a.m. PST for the Harrison Dupré talk. See more details and register on the SFPL event listing.

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These women discovered they were siblings. Then, they found hundreds more. It has taken a toll.

USA Today, January 23, 2024

Thanks to 23andMe, Jaclyn Frosolone discovered she had hundreds of siblings because her mother used an anonymous sperm donor to conceive her. What's more, the donor's DNA was riddled with genetic predispositions for a variety of painful medical conditions that she shares with these newly discovered siblings. This piece dives into the mind-boggling ways and means of sperm banks while profiling one brave woman who stepped forward to tell her story. 

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A Master of Cold Cases: Sunnyvale Detective Has Cracked Killings That Go Unsolved For Years

San Francisco Chronicle, Dec 31, 2023

Matt Hutchison, member of the Sunnyvale public safety task force, has solved eight cold cases when he has free time away from his other assignments. The elaborate plans and dogged thinking covered in the story are fascinating--like how he managed to orchestrate collecting DNA evidence by posing as a trash man. Also interesting is the way Sunnyvale manages its public safety employees, cycling them through police duties, firefighting duties, and EMT duties. When it's easy to see the gulf between the plot of a detective television show and real life, a person like Hutchison gets profiled in way that restores your faith in humanity. 

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The Rebirth of Local Journalism

New York Times Morning Newsletter, December 22, 2023

(Note: this NYT newsletter piece is linked as a gift article; you can set up your own free NYT access with a 72 hr access code to view website-only content. See instructions.)

Speaking of restoring one's faith in humanity, how about some restoration in the faith of journalism? In an era beleagured by newsroom staff layoffs and the folding of magazine publications, we take delight in this round up of the best pieces investigated and written up by local journalists. Take for instance reporters Justin Hicks and Jess Clark who followed an impossible school bus route for a story by Louisville Public Media.

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Thank You For Screaming

Meanjin Magazine, Summer 2023

We have this Australian literary/cultural magazine on display in our beautiful reading room on the 5th floor of the Main Library (link to catalog record), which is where you'll have to come to read this short memoir. (Or, email mnc@sfpl.org for some help.) The author finds herself in a Berlin U-Bahn station with an unconscious person on the tracks and a train fast approaching. Will the person survive? Is the author a good person? All important moments of suspense driving the narrative.

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I Must Be Dreaming

Bloomsbury, 2023

Ok ok, it's not an article from a magazine or newspaper, but it's a book from everyone's favorite New Yorker cartoonist, Roz Chast! As Library Journal puts it, "[Chast presents a] wide-ranging and thoroughly charming exploration of her lifelong fascination with deciphering the dream world inside her mind at night." After all the seriousness in the world, we appreciate the levity. Follow the link in the title to get it as a physical or electronic book through the SFPL catalog.

The First African American Newspaper in California

Last week we hosted the program Workshop: Digitized Black Newspapers (see the end of this post for a recap), so we've been exploring the history of the earliest African American newspapers from San Francisco. 

Mirror of the Times

According to the Library of Congress, Mirror of the Times was the first African American newspaper printed in California. It came into existence as the need for a Black newspaper became evident as a result of the Colored Conventions that began happening in California in 1855 and to serve as an organ of the fight for Black testimony rights and education. Jonas H. Townsend was an important leader for the 1855, 1856, and 1857 Colored Conventions, and was a founding member and editor of the Mirror of the Times.

 

Front page of the Dec. 12, 1857 issue of Mirror of the Times. Courtesy of Library of Congress

Only two issues of the newspaper are known to exist, although most likely it was printed on a weekly basis for more than a year. One issue, from Dec. 12, 1857, is available online in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America digital collection of newspapers. The other known issue, from August 22, 1857, does not seem to be available in any databases online, but is in the holdings of the California State Library (amongst other libraries), and their special collections librarian kindly sent us a photographic reproduction of the front and back pages of the newspaper! 

Front and back pages of the Aug. 22, 1857 issue of the Mirror of the Times. Courtesy of the California State Library. Click to view high resolution image.

It is not clear when exactly the newspaper started to be printed, nor when it ceased being printed. In fact it may be impossible to determine the start and end date with certainty lacking the discovery of another issue of the paper. 

Most likely the first issue of the newspaper was printed on September 13, 1856. This date originates in A History of California Newspapers by Edward Kemble, a California "pioneer" and San Francisco newspaperman active in the newspaper milieu of 1840s-50s. The book was originally published in 1858. Snorgrass, writing in the California History journal in 1981, asserts the first issue would be October 31, 1856, but that date is figured by counting backward from known issues and assumes the newspaper was printed on a weekly schedule like clockwork. Those of us who work with periodicals know they can be a gnarly format and it is not a surefire bet to count backward like Snorgrass does. 

Meanwhile, the Mirror of the Times is listed in Gregory's Union List of Newspapers (available at the Magazines and Newspapers Center reference desk), which cannot be said for many early Californian newspapers, but that index has the dates of publication as 1857-1858.

Kemble's A History of California Newspapers says of the Mirror, "Early in the year, the Weekly Mirror of the Times was founded by some colored men, as an advocate of the interests of the Africans of the State. It died early in '58. It was edited by Jonas H. Townsend" (127). 

Later, in the Index to Newspapers (p. 284) in the back of the book, it says:

Mirror of the Times......................... 127

w S 13 1856-1858?

Negro

reprinted articles from San Francisco Pacific and Post

see also: Moore, J. J.; Newly, W. H.; Townsend, Jonas H. 

This information, while valuable, also propagates errors: the Newly noted in Kemble's index should be William H. Newby, not Newly. Newby isn't as widely described as his colleagues in the literature, but Moore and Townsend do appear in the African American National Biography.

Growing Comfortable with Ambiguity

Maybe it does not matter the exact dates of the Mirror of the Times without new issues being discovered. What does matter is the historical significance and context of the publication, which has been more illuminated since the founding of the digital humanities Colored Conventions Project. The other thing that matters is the names of the people involved in this venture: Moore, Newby, and Townsend, all of whom Kemble mentions, as well as Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, who is easily the most well known of the four men. Long after The Mirror of the Times ceased publication, these men continued to involve themselves in abolitionism and fighting for African American equality.

Townsend

 

If only San Francisco's Townsend Street were named after our guy, Jonas Holland Townsend. Alas, it is named after another Townsend. 

 

Townsend helped found The Mirror of the Times and was its editor. 

In the Library of Congress's Mirror of the Times info page, Townsend's life narrative is given form; meanwhile, on the Colored Conventions Project Documents site, it is possible to digitally access Townsend's preamble at the 1856 Colored Convention. The entry on Townsend in volume 7 of the African American National Biography sketches his life a bit more fully and offers this 1855 description of Townsend before he came out to California as part of the gold rush: "a tall, sedate, prim, puritanical, intellectual looking young man. We soon took the starch out of him... and transformed him from an embryo country person to a regular New York business man" (626).

Moore

Moore is well known as a pastor for the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church and worked closely with Townsend to found the Mirror of the Times. Later, he also wrote for the Black San Francisco newspaper The Elevator. His life is sketched out in volume 5 of the African American National Biography and is the subject of an article by Montesano published in 1973.

Newby 

What do we know about William H. Newby? He's not in the African American National Biography and his name isn't even spelled right in Kemble's newspaper history! Thankfully, English professor Eric Gardner devotes several pages to Newby in chapter three of his book Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, positioning Newby as a lightning rod of Black intellectualism in gold rush San Francisco. Active in the Colored Conventions like the others, Newby was also important to the founding of the Mirror and wrote for its pages.

State Executive Committee 

Many others were involved with the Mirror of the Times enterprise, including Gibbs, who is given maybe a little too much credit in other places on the web for his contribution to the Mirror of the Times. Below is a detailed clipping from the Dec. 12, 1857 issue with the full Committee membership listed. This group was a coalition of individuals formed from the Colored Convention attendees who functioned as the publisher of the newspaper, managing the paper's finances and smooth running. 

 

List includes: M. W. Gibbs, J. P. Dyer, J. H. Townsend, J. G. Marshall, E. J. Johnson, F. G. Barbadoes, J. G. Wilson, R. A. Hall, W. Bedford, G. W. Booth, I. Morton, E. P. Duplex, G. R. Symes, W. H. Hall, C. M. Wilson, E. Reeves, Thomas Duff, R. Shorter, G. W. Thomas, G. W. Miller, W. H. Harper, R. H. Johnson, A. Outley, M. T. Smith, W. H. Gordon, D. McReynolds

What Happened After the Mirror? 

 

The Mirror folded in 1858 and it wasn't until 1862 that the Pacific Appeal was founded, continuing the important work of lobbying for Black testimony rights, education rights, and Black suffrage by many of the same individuals who had been involved in the Mirror, minus those who had left California, like Townsend, Newly, and Gibbs. Gardner says, "The reasons for the hiatus between the Mirror and the Pacific Appeal remain fuzzy and are probably tied to a combination of financial factors and political events: it seems very likely that the Appeal was largely funded because of California blacks' hopes vis-à-vis the Civil War" (210n30). Three years later, the Elevator came on the scene, made famous by its Black female journalist Jennie Carter.

Digitized Versions of These Newspapers 

 

Check out the Library of Congress's section of their Chronicling America database on African American newspapers to see what issues are digitally available online. Highly recommended as well is the California Digital Newspaper Collection, where the Pacific Appeal and the Elevator's digital surrogates are available for free. 

Workshop Recap And Bibliography

If you missed the Magazines and Newspapers Center workshop on digitized Black newspapers, see below for the handout that was made available at the workshop. It has specific instructions for locating newspapers in SFPL resources and beyond, and offers a brief bibliography of sources. 

San Jose Mercury News Electronic Access

Up until summer of 2023, the only way to view issues of the San Jose Mercury News from before 1985 was to pull up a seat at a microfilm reader. All that changed when the San Jose Public Library (SJPL) made the 1900-1985 historic backfile of the Merc available online. Thanks to a special donor, SJPL was able to work with the Newsbank database to digitize and make available this treasure trove to everyone in the state of California for free! 

Image courtesy of San Jose Public Library

While not connected with San Francisco Public Library at all, the database is available to any California state resident so the staff of the Magazines and Newspapers Center encourages you to set-up your own access to start enjoying. 

Read all about the new database on the San Jose Public Library website, and apply for eLibrary Card for Instant Online Access without having to visit a SJPL branch in person. 

That Writer's Hustle: Lit Mags @ SFPL

We know you writers out there. We see you hustling to find places to read fresh fiction, essays, and poetry. We see you hustling to find good places to submit your own fresh writing, and we see you tracking those submissions relentlessly. We see you shifting from digital to print and back again. We see you eyeing the 2024 new year thinking, This is the year I get published in the New Yorker! 

 

Ok, maybe not the New Yorker (they say submitting to the New Yorker is like throwing a boomerang), but there are plenty of great lit mags out there thirsting for the unique voices of the storytellers and poets among us. 

Here are some tips for that literary life hustle from SFPL Magazines and Newspapers Center. 

Directories 

Where to publish? Where to read? Try a directory to look up information about specific magazines.

Ulrichs, a.k.a. Ulrichsweb

Ulrichsweb is an easy-to-search source of detailed information on more than 300,000 periodicals (also called serials) of all types: academic and scholarly journals, e-journals, peer-reviewed titles, popular magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and more. It's also possible to do an advanced search to identify publications in the subject of arts and literature. This is a database provided by SFPL.

DuoTrope

Duotrope is a subscription-based service that provides a searchable directory of literary publishers and agents. It also provides a calendar of deadlines and a personal submission tracker. DuoTrope is so connected to the indie writing scene that sometimes it has more accurate information about publications than Ulrichs. DuoTrope also is the proprietor of the Duosuma submission software and portal, a competitor to Submittable. This is not a resource available through SFPL, but is a resource every serious writer should consider using. There is a free trial option for the entire month of January, 2024. 

Poets & Writers Literary Magazines Database

For a free option vis-à-vis DuoTrope, check out the PW database. You can limit by genre, format, and other attributes. 

Electronic Lit Mags

Do you fancy reading lit mags online? Plenty of access options are available, whether your beloved mag is behind a paywall or not.

Periodical Finder

Option 1: Search by title for a known lit magazine

Periodical Finder is your tool for locating electronic access to magazines through the SFPL subscriptions. When you search for a title, you will be presented with access links and the date range of content available if the magazine is available through the SFPL subscriptions. 

In the case of looking up Prairie Schooner in Periodical Finder, as we see in the screenshot above, we see that all the magazine's content from the end of 1991 to the current day is available in one of several Gale databases (Gale is a vendor from which we license a lot of information). The last link, SFPL Print Collection, will take you to the classic SFPL catalog, which will give you information about the print holdings. 

Option 2: Browse the Literature and Writing discipline, available from the bottom of the Periodical Finder landing page. Explore the facets on the left side to tailor your result list to the type of lit mags you're after.

Flipster

Flipster is an e-magazine platform the library subscribes to. You can look at on your desktop as a website, or use it on an app for Android or iOS. It is possible to browse the literary category upon entering the platform to see what magazines they have on offer. It's a great interface that totally simulates the experience of paging through a physical magazine. Titles available in Flipster will also show up in Periodical Finder. Some of my favorite lit mags in Flipster include Poetry magazine and Room Magazine.

On the open web

There are so many literary mags that are free on the open web! Those ones will show up in DuoTrope, but not necessarily Ulrichs. Don't discount them just because they're free online. For example, the University of San Francisco literary journal, Invisible City, is free online (and ad-free!). Use your Google-fu (or whatever search engine you please) to find lists other writers have put together of the "best" online lit mags.

Print Lit Mags

Some prefer the prestige of physical literary magazines. Some prefer just having something physical in their hands to read. That's part of why I love the print version of Poetry magazine: it's a slim companion that doesn't take up much room wherever I go, so I often carry my personal copy in my backpack.

 

We have a rich selection of literary magazines on display in the 5th floor Magazines and Newspapers Center reading room at the Main Library. The most recent issue of each title is put on display as soon as we receive it.  

• A Public Space
• Alfred Hitchcock's mystery
• American poetry review
• American short fiction
• Analog Science Fiction & Fact
• Booklist
• Bookmarks
• Calyx
• Creative nonfiction
• Ellery Queen's mystery
• Five points
• ForeWord
• Fourteen hills
• Fourth genre
• Georgia review
• Granta
• Kirkus reviews
• Locus
• Mad
• Massachusetts review
• Meanjin
• Modern poetry in translation
• New American Writing
• New Letters
• Paris review
• Poetry
• Publisher's Weekly
• Science Fiction Studies
• Sewanee review
• Southern Cultures
• Virginia quarterly review, The
• World literature today
• Writer, The
• Yale Review
• Zoetrope
• Zyzzyva

There are more of these behind the scenes. Ask for help from the librarian nearby, or search in the classic SFPL catalog to see what else we have.

Trade Magazines for Writers 

These ones don't necessarily offer creative writing to be read, but they are trade publications for people exactly like you: writers both aspiring and established, writers of both poetry and prose. They give valuable advice on opportunities for getting published and finding time and space to write, and feature essays by other writers about the craft and experience of being a creative writer. 

Poets & Writers is available in print in the library and online in Flipster. The magazine features profiles of prominent writers, essays reflecting on all aspects of writing, prompts, and opportunities for publishing, fellowships, awards, contests, etc.

Writer's Digest  is another monthly magazine available in print in the library and online in Flipster. It is very similar to Poets & Writers in offering all manner of support for writers. The 2024 Yearbook special issue is a must-read for all writers out there!

Other (Free) Resources

So many magazines for creatives of any type offer free e-newsletters as a complement to their monthly print magazine. Whenever you encounter a magazine that speaks your language, visit their website to see if they have a free newsletter you can sign up for. 

Mslexia

Coming out of the U.K., this is a magazine "for women who write," and while SFPL does not currently subscribe to it, the magazine offers a free newsletter through their website, sponsors writing contests, and offers support and products for purchase for women writers.

Submittable 

No aspiring writer worth their salt doesn't have a Submittable account. Calling itself "A social impact platform that's good for all" nowadays, Submittable started as a solution for independent lit mag editors to manage submissions in a streamlined way. It remains the most commonly used platform for lit mags to accept submissions for publication consideration. Once you have a Submittable account, it becomes much easier to submit your work and to track your submissions.

Lit Mag News Substack

This Substack email newsletter, which you can read online like a blog and which boasts robust comments on the posts, tackles all issues germane to the independent publishing industry, from both the writer's perspective and the editor's. 

Paper dreams : writers and editors on the American literary magazine

Special shoutout to this book, which gives context, backstory, and rejuvenation to the slog through getting your work published in a lit mag.

Happy submitting and reading! MNC offers the best of luck to all the aspiring writers out there.

Consumer Reports Buying Guide for 2024

New year, new installment of being an informed consumer. 

The 2024 Consumer Reports Buying Guide is now available online through SFPL's subscriptions. 

Click image to access the 2024 CR Buying Guide on Flipster

The best way to access this annual publication is to look at it in Flipster, an eMagazine platform the library offers. Flipster completely simulates the feeling of paging through a physical magazine, while offering all the perks of a digital publication, like text highlighting, text searching, downloading via the app or as a PDF on your desktop. 

🧐Read the 2024 CR Buying Guide on Flipster🧐

🤓View previous years of the CR Buying Guide on Flipster🤓

The 2024 Buying Guide includes sections on cars, ranges, phones, laptops, mattresses, TVs, grills, fridges, and more!