Studying the table of contents for any given issue of The Saturday Book reveals a sort of consistent inconsistency. The publication’s founding editor, Leonard Russell, laid out a plan that included some essentials, but their inclusion was never tidy or regimented, and the book’s very inconsistency was a central feature of its structure and identity as a publication. In a funny little postscript appended to the table of contents for the 12th issue (the first edited by Russell’s successor, John Hadfield), for example, we learn that
As we were going to press, we realized that this issue contained nothing about Crime, which our revered Founder, in his first issue, twelve years since, postulated as a necessary ingedient in the book. Shamefacedly, and as a manifest fill-up, we have squeezed in this Elizabethan woodcut of that cobwebby whodunit, the murder of Thomas Arden of Feversham, in February 1550-1, by Black Will and Shakbag, to the order of Mistress Arden and her paramour, Mosbie.1
The Saturday Book, Issue 12 (1952), p. 6
This is the sort of thing one has to get used to in order to read The Saturday Book — a kind of oopsie-daisy, throw-it-all-in-there-and-don’t-sweat-the-details attitude that sits right on top of some actually quite meticulous design and organization.
Some issues have lots of essays; most have lots of photographs. Some have poetry with cartoonish illustrations; others have numerous selections of short fiction. There are oddball photo essays about The Household Brigade, collections of paintings of roses, fondly nostalgic Victoriana, faintly mocking Victoriana, and in at least one notable instance a “photo quiz” that appears to be an attempt to fill out a section of glossy image pages with leftover photos from various essays in a way that also serves as a sort of in-joke for contributors and long-time readers (one of the photos is, in fact, a shot of a well-loved long-time friend of the editors). While there were (sort of? usually?) section titles represented in the table of contents for each issue, they were not always the same section titles. Some were more descriptive than others, some leaned toward the clever side, and some were just…odd. Russell and Hadfield appear to have had similarly whimsical senses of humor and both leaned decidedly toward the absurd on any given occasion in this context, so their whims tended to be well-represented in both the choice of content and the mode of its presentation.
Particularly in the earlier years of The Saturday Book, the Introductions to each issue were nearly more absurd than informative, exemplifying rather than describing what was most Saturdiurnal (Hadfield’s apparent coinage) about the text and its expected readers: subjects “beautiful, curious and disregarded” and afficionadoes of same (Issue 13, p 5). Russell’s farewell Introduction in the eleventh issue is both heartfelt and entirely silly, archly illustrated with “a farewell garland” of “dogs, Sunderland lustre, Victoriana, everything practically except Poll Sweedlepipe himself” (Issue 11, p. 11), and Hadfield’s Introduction as the new editor in the twelfth issue is mostly a ridiculous sidetrack about house-hunting and Elizabethiana that ends by affirming the apparent frivolity of the whole enterprise of the Introduction (and the book) itself:
When we try to survey the History of Our Own Times we find it written in the Charleston and the cloche hat. We prefer insects and embroidery to Movements and Trends. We would rather gaze through Arthur Devis’s vistas to the distant gazebo than consider the economic effects of the Seven Years’ War. Even when we try to focus our attention on such awe-inspiring portents as guided missiles and the A, H, or is it now the Z? bomb, we find ourselves cutting out a woodcut of an Elizabethan whizbang and sticking it to the bottom of the page.
The Saturday Book, Issue 12 (1952), p. 14
Alas, we have no Serious Purpose to commend us. Indeed the only serious task we have tackled — and, we observe, completed — is to fill the pages allotted for this Introduction to the twelfth, the largest, and, as our revered Founder has graciously assured us, not the least interesting issue of The Saturday Book.
A large part of the charm of the book’s thoroughgoing purposelessness, for me, may lie in the publication’s close community of contributors and readers, including Russell’s wife, the great film and cultural critic Dilys Powell, and frequent flyers Olive Cook and Edwin Smith (Smith also served alongside Laurence Scarfe as a designer and photo editor for The Saturday Book). This is a production in play created by and for that community of creative people, working out their engagement in all of the little curiousities and side projects and collections that might never otherwise have seen the light of day as they both represented and turned away from the culture of their time and looked just slightly backward, turned a bit topsy-turvy. The closing of issue thirty-four (the final regular publication run, in 1974) sets this present-comment-looking-back tone one last time with a selection of photos curated by Mary Anne Norbury, titled “Then and Now.” It features eleven pairs of black-and-white images, each pair composed of a photo from the 1880s-1920s and a photo from the late 1960s-1974. Victorian and Edwardian styles and poses are set in sharp relief against streakers and naked sunbathers from the 1970s. As absurd as the comparisons are, they are also curiously ironic for The Saturday Book, which was never so much conservative in its leanings as it was nostalgic; the matched photos simultaneously invoke that nostalgia in the context of an apparent “look what the world’s come to” statement and poke fun at any judgement one might make about it. My favorite, I think, is a cricket jab perfectly designed to appeal to anyone familiar with the Ashes:
The Saturday Book, in its friendly playfulness, reminds me of nothing so much as a high school yearbook put together by a plucky staff of clever, artsy school chums who tried regularly to outdo themselves and each other for oddball new ways to fill out the pages available, and often succeeded in creating astute cultural criticism.
Next time: Designed to Delight
- For those interested in the murder in question, there’s a whole Elizabethan play about it, often attributed to Christopher Marlowe, thought to be among the first dramas of its kind written about a current (as opposed to historical) event. Check it out at the Internet Archive to get all of the creepy details.
The Deaccessioned Philosopher 