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John Milsom, Early Music and materiality—2, Early Music, Volume 51, Issue 1, February 2023, Pages 10–14, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caac073
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To pulp or not to pulp? That is the question many readers will face as they stare at their old back copies of journals filling up the shelves. Why remain loyal to a journal in its printed form, when electronic access and PDF storage make much more sense in so many ways? It was the prospect of a house-move that finally forced my own decision. With heavy heart and heavy loads, I dumped most of my old paper-copy journals in the recycling bin, and turned instead to the superb resources of JSTOR (https://jstor.org). But there was one exception: I could not bear to part with my unbroken run of Early Music, which was far too cherished to destroy. This journal alone withstood the carnage, and that decision now leaves me wondering why those printed copies of Early Music survived when all the others fell.
In her anniversary reflections above, Tess Knighton gets to the heart of the matter when she savours the materiality of the physical Early Music—its weight, its feel, its look, above all its busy and alluring layouts, in which text, images, notation and advertisements all vie with one another in a delightful mélange, page after page after page. To that, I would add that the front covers and the coloured spines also matter, because they give each issue its own personality; the arrival of a fresh copy of Early Music feels as much like an act of collecting as it does of subscribing. In addition, I respect the journal for its larger-than-normal page size. An opened-up print copy of Early Music dwarfs the screens of the laptop and tablets I would otherwise use to access PDFs of its content, and on those devices I would typically read the journal in scrollable single-page view, whereas the print journal forces me to attend to what is often its finest feature: the superb design of its double-page spreads.
