Editorial

Joshua Loo, Benedict Randall Shaw, and Isky Mathews

Supplementary №1, Volume II

The Editor, Isky Mathews, and Benedict Randall Shaw

The New Year has prompted a little æsthetic reflexion, culminating in the various changes present in this supplementary. It is desired that this issue should represent an improvement on the previous editions not only æsthetically but also in legibility, clarity and economy—of ink, paper and so on.

It behoves me (as editor) to thank those who have supported us in our experiment to this point: the members of the Library Committee, who have been a constant support, the ever-present librarians—Mrs. Goetzee, Ms. Stone, Ms Stringer and M^me Dessouroux—who have caught many typos and other stylistic problems, our perennial scientific-cum-mathematic authors—Benedict Randall Shaw and Isky Mathews—and other contributors—James Bithell, Benedict Mee, Thomas Adamo and Luke Dunne to name a few, the Chair of the Library Committee—Jonny Heywood—whose drawings on the cover have prevented several delays, and our readers, whose existence some authors were not entirely sure of initially, but who have surprised us by their appearance and comments in the most unlikely of places—in the Library Committee, when walking around, and even in the lunch queue.

It may also be useful to elaborate further on the nature of this experiment. The Librarian exists to publish ‘good’ articles, for a certain value thereof; perhaps the best description of what we seek is from Hacker News, an online forum administered by Y Combinator, a startup incubator, who ask that submissions should ‘gratif[y] one’s intellectual curiosity’¹. There is little further purpose. We do not desire particularly for a large readership; we recognise that our aim is not such that all will find our publication interesting, and are happy to leave them to read those publications which they find more to their taste; this is, after all, an experiment. Many have suggested that our readership is excessively small. Those who are significantly involved in The Librarian too often thought that there were few readers. We have been greatly heartened by our discovery of multiple readers; we deduce from the gradual disappearance of the copies of The Librarian that at least twelve or so people must read this.

Nevertheless, we have been less heartened by the response to our appeals for contributions; we are not so much disheartened by a lack of articles or content —though we are not exactly inundated by proposals for long form articles of the highest quality whose publication must unfortunately be delayed—but by a lack of other cogent perspectives; all but one of our polemics was written by the editor, all articles relating to mathematics and the sciences were written either by Benedict Randall Shaw or Isky Mathews, and the situation in our review section is only a little better. There is no use in the pretence that those who have written for The Librarian represent a diverse spectrum of anything, really. Certainly, we do not represent a wide spectrum of life experiences—which, however hard we may try, will inevitably occasionally affect one’s writing, nor can it be said that we are intellectually, politically or socially detached from each other. There may be fault on our part—it has been suggested that The Librarian does not appear accessible—but, equally, there is no remedy save an increase in the submission of articles. The present surplus of scientific and mathematic articles, though regrettable, is simply a product of the greater advancement of the lack of articles in other areas.

The reader need not worry, of course, that this publication will fold; there are enough of us to steer the ship into greener pastures, though perhaps not enough to avoid Jim Hacker-like mixing of metaphors and their analogues elsewhere. Those more prone to worries of civilisational collapse or general qualitative collapse in the constitutions of the present generation would not, however, be swayed from such views were they to read some of the older editions of The Elizabethan, not so much because they would find its content better—for the more serious content has not disappeared but moved to other publications, viz. Camden and Hooke—but that there seem to have existed a vast array of pupil-run independent publications. That it happened that the population of a house—in a time where the conveniences of modern technology were scarcely known to the typewriter-employing creatures of the era—was able to sustain an entire termly publication is astonishing. That there were several mentioned, viz. the Grantite Review, Ashtree, Rigaudite Review and College Street Clarion, and that there was, further, a scientific publication, viz. Nucleus, a cultural publication, viz. Polygon² and yet The Elizabethan did not appear to suffer from the want of articles later complained of by the 1970s³ could perhaps most charitably be described as an indictment of the relative state of the present pupil body.

One should not be surprised to find that our proposed remedy is writing for The Librarian (and, indeed, all other school publications); the present crop of publications is published very irregularly—The Librarian seems to be the most frequent, but is rather short, and the others are far too infrequent. The problem is not so much that there is a lack of publications, so much as that they are too infrequently published to make a major impression upon school life, and will only be rectified if we should contrive to increase the frequency of their publication.

Some readers may ask why one should wish for pupil publications⁴ at all. To them, we say that a publication ensures that those who seek to write are able to embarrass themselves before they reach the outside world; it ameliorates the fluency and clarity with which those who contribute and those who read think; it provides an historical record for those who will in the future wonder how we write, think and spend our time at present; it is, in short, a great contribution to the denizens of the community whose time it disturbs or graces. We should find no greater pleasure in our time at Westminster were we to achieve these aims.