Archiving Saturday Night
By Suzanne Bowness

from The Beaver, December 2002

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In 1887, the editor of a rather sensational daily paper called the Toronto News was sued for libel by the entire 65th Battalion of Montreal, over a story that alleged the officers had shirked their service duties in the West because of their sympathies with the rebel leader, Louis Riel. Although the editor being sued had not seen the piece in question (he had been in the process of negotiating his editorship) he took responsibility for it, and for months dodged the warrants that were issued to bring him to trial in Montreal. By the time the editor finally surrendered, the litigation had gone on so long and both parties had lost so much money that the courts, while finding him guilty, decided to be lenient on him and fined him a nominal $500. Besides the fine though, his sentence also included a stipulation forbidding the editor from editing another daily newspaper in Canada. In light of this ruling, the editor, one Edmund E. Sheppard, decided to found a weekly paper instead, a broadsheet that "while devoting itself largely to literature, will be essentially a paper of today, dealing with current topics". Sheppard named this paper Saturday Night.

One hundred and fifteen years later, that broadsheet, not particularly unique in its day, has achieved something that eluded its many contemporaries: survival. Initially by luck and later by reputation, Saturday Night magazine has endured 15 editors (and counting), various frequencies (weekly, monthly, bimonthly), appearances (broadsheet, magazine) and editorial approaches. As a result, it now stands as an observer of the evolution of Canadian culture--albeit in its early years as an observer of the narrower slice of Canadians who were upper class, and Torontonian. As the years went by and the magazine broadened its focus on national issues it became a more representative eyewitness (though it never quite lost its early reputation for upper-class pretensions, or its reputation for being Toronto-centric for that matter). Since the general interest magazine has been and remains a rarity in this country, Saturday Night's pages provide a rare glimpse into the challenges we've encountered over the decades, from World War I conscription to French-English relations to the civil rights issues of the sixties. In light of the fact that so many of these issues still challenge us today, it's a record of their development and a reminder of their complexity. A collective memory, perhaps.

Before I ever worked at Saturday Night, or before I even knew how old it was, the magazine was important to me. Saturday Night was the first magazine that I subscribed to myself; I started reading it in high school. For some reason the lure of Harpers or the New Yorker eluded me and instead it was this Canadian general interest magazine that appealed. After university, I applied for an internship and so was lucky enough to learn about the magazine world at my favourite publication. Even more fortunate was the fact that between May 2000 and September 2001, Saturday Night returned to its roots as a weekly publication after many years as a monthly magazine and so many of us junior people (read: interns) found ourselves hired, in my case, as Online Editor, taking the magazine into an electronic domain that the magazine's founder could never have dreamed of. At this time, I became interested in the magazine's early history and decided it would be a good focus for my English masters thesis at York University, which I had been pursuing part time while working at Saturday Night. Then in September 2001 the magazine stopped publication. Even though Saturday Night has never been a real moneymaker and this kind of suspension had happened in its past, the news came as a shock. After this new reality sunk in, among the lingering concerns in my mind and that of my coworkers was what would happen to the potentially valuable historical material in the office. Since I had been using some of the archives for history sections on our web site, and I was about to begin real research for my thesis, I offered to sort through the older materials left in the office and arrange for their transfer to the official Saturday Night archives at McMaster University

When Saturday Night first crossed my radar as a teenager, I didn't really consider or appreciate its importance to our national culture. As I began to read more about its history, I realized that the magazine studied as a whole could also offers us some larger insights about the issues that have concerned Canadians in the early years of this country, about how those issues resurfaced and evolved in various decades. Moreover, the body of work that is Saturday Night is by now a repository for the early work of many now-famous Canadians, and also proof that a publication can survive its creators and evolve to have a life and history of its own. Yet Saturday Night was so busy telling our stories that the story of its own development is not so well documented. For that we must rely on the often accidental survivors of its production: supplementary materials that become the record of its living, its archives.

Originally titled Toronto Saturday Night and published as a broadsheet newspaper, Saturday Night was so named because it was illegal to publish on the Sabbath, although it was really intended for leisurely Sunday reading. Back then, the streets of Toronto were gas lit at night, taxis were in fact horses and carriages, and Canada had only become its own country twenty years previous. At that time editor Edmund Sheppard described his new venture as a "paper of today, dealing with current topics" and filled it with information relevant to his largely upper class readership: who was running for public office, what parties had been held that week and who attended them, and where the rich families of Toronto were going on vacation in the summer. Today, the paper's back copies provide a neat record of what life was like in the late 1800s, and by reading them we gain insight into the daily lives that were lived in this early Toronto, what the political climate was like, what kind of entertainment was popular, what authors were in vogue--information for which there are few other sources.

Besides reflecting the general mood and concerns of its early readership, Saturday Night's pages also contain the actual words written by the thinkers, writers, poets and artists published in its pages, many who were just starting out in their publishing careers, many of whom are still known today. Back in the 1890s, Edmund Sheppard recruited such names as Archibald Lampman, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Stephen Leacock to write for his publication. He also discovered Pauline Johnson, a poet whose work he read in a New York magazine and invited to be a regular Saturday Night contributor. As it turns out, the longevity of these names set a standard for a long-lasting reputation of publishing quality contributors, which by the early twentieth century was solid enough to attract talent like literary editors Arthur Deacon and Robertson Davies, portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh (who started out as a staff photographer with Saturday Night in the 1930s, largely covering the local theatre scene in Ottawa). This reputation continued into the later century, with now-beloved journalists like Peter Gzowski and Mordecai Richler as contributors.

As a 115-year work in progress, Saturday Night also demonstrates the life stages of a Canadian periodical, a publication that in one that began as a weekly society paper full of society news and novel serializations (most notably Sheppard's own books such as his novel Widower Jones but also Canadian serializations of books by Emile Zola and Thomas Hardy). Through its decades Saturday Night eluded obsolescence by careful metamorphosis. In the twenties under Joseph T. Clark and Frederick Paul, it became largely a largely financial publication, expanded its page count, developed women's section, and repositioned itself as a national publication. In the late 1940s, the magazine finally changed from broadsheet to magazine format and developed longer, more in-depth stories under Arnold Edinborough and then Robert Fulford. Slowly the magazine was moving towards the Saturday Night we know today, with a reputation for intriguing in-depth stories that continue to dig where the nightly news and daily papers leave off.

In starting my thesis research, I realized that the magazine's record was spotty in its early years; there were hard copies and microfiche of the magazine itself but little supplementary material beyond that. Luckily later editors had realized this and started an official archive of the magazine at McMaster University, which has some reputation as a repository for publishing materials in Canada, with holdings from McClelland and Stewart, the Writers Union of Canada, the Canadian Fiction Magazine and more. As with most archives, McMaster had constructed a detailed inventory of the current holdings, mostly editorial material donated by Robert Fulford and containing largely boxes of correspondence from the likes of Hugh Garner, John Glassco, Margaret Atwood, Matt Cohen, Pierre Berton, Mordecai Richler and others. In the detailed guide to what could be found in the archives, there was a note that stated unfortunately it had been standard procedure for the magazine to discard all editorial materials one year after the date of publication, so all record of publishing during Arnold Edinborough's editorship had been lost. For me this was disappointing news, and incentive to get started.

For me, the work was difficult on many levels: I had just lost my job at the magazine, and at the time it seemed like the publication had ceased for good. It was also exciting: I had just started to do the serious background reading for my thesis and to get a sense of the magazine's early importance. I was eager for these valuable copies of the magazine in the office to be preserved. Finally it was daunting: certainly there were people associated with the magazine who had already done more to preserve its history than me (both by seeking out these treasures and by writing about the magazine's history). I was just the latest in a long line of people who respected its past and wanted the best for what remained of its physical being. In fact everyone who had worked at the magazine with me felt the need to preserve these materials, I was just lucky enough to be the one to sort through it.

Although the material was the magazine's, the expertise in knowing what parts were important historical records clearly belonged to the official archivist, Dr. Carl Spadoni. My job would be to prepare a detailed inventory of what was available in the office, and then he would visit and decide which materials the archives could accommodate. Of principal interest were the older books, bound copies of the magazines from the 1940s, and loose, paper copies from the 1930s, collected by former editor John Fraser and in remarkably good condition. After I had compiled a list of materials, the archivists at McMaster searched through their own catalogues of what they had in the collections already; the decisions on what to keep would be largely dictated by the current gaps in the Saturday Night collection.

Curious as to how the gaps in Saturday Night's record measured up to those of other magazines, I began to read about the founding and early years of other publications. I discovered that preservation has a lot to do with chance--many of Saturday Night's early general interest contemporaries that are now fully obscure, titles such as Belford's Magazine founded in the late 1870s, or Goldwin Smith's The Week. Yet there some magazines such the trade publication Canadian Grocer, founded around the same era, exists in hard copy all the way back to its founding in 1889. Beyond our borders, American magazines also share the plague of an incomplete memory. Even a magazine like the New Yorker, subject of many factual studies, catty memoirs and introspections, is not perfectly documented. In her book on the magazine Gone, journalist Renata Adler pauses briefly from her general rant on the magazine's current era to describe her findings at the New York Public Library where the New Yorker archives were donated (granted, by the editor to whom Adler applies most of her venom): "The archive was a scandal. Several hundred linear feet of documents had been lost, in transit from the New Yorker's offices on Forty-third Street to the library on Forty-second. The introduction, the chronology, and guide to the documents, was, by turns, superficial, uninformed, inaccurate, and plain wrong. Documents, which should have been in the archive, including pieces that actually ran in the magazine, were not in it. Documents which did not belong in the archive, letters from applicants rejected for jobs, rejected manuscripts, were there in profusion. A lot of material was misfiled." In her indignation over the state of these archives, Adler suggests that it is "almost the ultimate of the ironic echoes that the New Yorker's archive would so mock the values of the magazine."

Indeed it does seem ironic-the very publications that in themselves serve so faithfully as a record of their national cultural histories frequently have comparatively little of their own culture or history written down. In some cases that history is recorded but only in a piecemeal way, in private correspondence to reconstructed by eager scholars. Historian Ellery Sedgwick has produced one of the best examples for this type of careful restoration in his The Atlantic Monthly: 1857-1909. Fortunately for Sedgwick The Atlantic Monthly's founders were thoughtful letter writers and diarists (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Richard Lowell, among others) whose papers were preserved and now serve as essential documents to supplement the actual copies of the magazine itself. The result is a fascinating reconstruction of an energetic time in literary New England, when these writers plotted to start a magazine that would not only provide them with a new space for publication but also a place to advocate their main political cause, the abolition of slavery.

Saturday Night's founders may have been letter writers too, but there's nothing of that left, it seems. That's not to say there weren't treasures to be found. The most interesting individual discoveries in my inventory included a beautiful colour Christmas supplement from 1892, an issue from 1909, a copy of Sheppard's Widower Jones, ((the first novel to be serialized in the inaugural issues of Saturday Night, its story rumoured to be based on the editor's own relationship with his stern father). Probably the most valuable item was a copy of Sheppard's second novel Dolly because it was not only in good condition but signed by Sheppard himself in dedication to his sister. Beyond these individual items, the other obvious finds were the disintegrating old bound volumes of broadsheets from the 1940s, whose dusty pages were already starting to lose their brittle corners. Definitely in need of a good cleaning and climate-controlled environment. In better condition were loose copies from the 1930s, an almost complete series of magazines that owed their preservation to the care of former editor John Fraser, who had actively pursued these old copies, buying them up for the magazine, along with old books by Saturday Night authors and editors. Although the paper trail for the magazine remains spotty, editors like Fraser have been keenly aware of the public's interest in 'the story behind the stories, and it is thanks to the memoirs of a number of later editors that we do have some intriguing background stories written down. The most notable source for early anecdotes is the Candid Chronicles of Hector Charlesworth, which describe incidents such as how Edmund Sheppard devised escape routes so that he could leave his office quickly if an angry visitor came to accuse him of libel, or how he would spit his tobacco in front of an early Ontario Premier Sir George Ross (with a mind to intimidate, Charlesworth reckoned). Later editors, including Arnold Edinborough, Robert Fulford and John Fraser would also contribute recollections of the magazine with their own chronicles. In particular, Robert Fulford and Morris Wolfe produced one of the most impressive compilations of interesting and representative Saturday Night material in the form of the Saturday Night Scrapbook: a collection of editorials and advertisements that provides a sampling of the magazine throughout its years.

Of course old treasures are the obvious valuables of a magazine, but what about the stuff we had been working on this past year? My first instinct was to keep it all. In new awareness of the scarcity of early Saturday Night archives, it seemed like everything was potentially valuable: story drafts, fact-checking materials, production proofs, the funky calendar that the art director kept on the wall outside her office. After a quick instructive conversation with the archivist, I realized that our space was limited; that the materials we would keep would be representative. Rather than keeping production proofs from each issue of a weekly magazine we would hold onto a few samples. As Dr. Spadoni pointed out, having too much material was almost worse than not having enough: not only does the archive become unwieldy for potential readers but there simply is not enough space at the universities, libraries, national archives, to contain it all.

Since we could not be comprehensive, we would be representative, keeping a sampling of story drafts from the past year, mostly by well-known contributors, such as drafts of the excerpt from Mordecai Richler's book on Snooker. And because the archives would have to be sorted and catalogued, McMaster could only accept what would be a manageable size of material to get through.

Even though not all our papers were historical, looking at the work produced by editors at the magazine as "documents" put me in a kind of self-aware place, one that I had already sampled when I worked at the magazine, that I think occurs to anyone who has worked on something with a bit of history: a feeling of responsibility to upholding a character that had been created before us. I wondered how founder Edmund Sheppard would have felt about the fact that we were looking after his magazine into the new millennium, how it probably would never have crossed his mind to dare keep his own notes for posterity, that doing so would have been tempting the publication's longevity. Then again like many good journalists, he may not have even stopped to consider that, so focused would he have been on the task at hand, creating weekly entertainment for his readers. Every once in a while I would go over to visit friends still working in the adjacent newsroom, just to remind myself of that very fact, that what we were preserving were the products of someone's livelihood. Yet in the case of Saturday Night, it is not just the record's of an individual's job but a public record of the news, preserved so that in another hundred years other curious people will know how we lived our lives, that our streetlights are now powered by electricity, that our taxis are now driven by fuel, that our country is still confederated after 135 years and that we're still not fully the issues raised on the Plains of Abraham. If the magazine is still around in another 115 years, it will be interesting to compare notes again, and hopefully by then there will be even more notes to compare.

As it turned out, Saturday Night did not end in 2001, it continues to be published, alive, and relevant. Yet it is a rare breed in Canada, a national general interest magazine that tackles the larger stories behind the news. As such its archives are also a rare record documenting a history of issues, revealing what Canadians have been thinking about throughout this century: French-English relations, women's suffrage, prohibition, conscription, immigration, intermarriage, the Dionne Quintuplets, pollution, patriotism, nationalism, the CBC, and the fact that national magazines are becoming a rare breed in Canada. While some of these issues are ones safely settled in the past, others continue to crop up in different eras, sparked by the present but fuelled by considerations of the past. Such is the condition of Saturday Night to its own history, though the stories its telling might be new, the magazine itself is old and storied, a reliable witness.