The Captain: A History, Index and Bibliography

Some time ago, Chris Harte sent me a photograph of "Nicholas Olde" (the pseudonymous author of The Incredible Adventures of Roland Hern, published in 1928) to go along with my entry on Olde, here, at my Lesser-Known Writers blog. It was a discovery from his work on a book on The Captain, a UK magazine for boys which ran from 1899 through 1924. 

His book has since been published. It is titled The Captain: A History, Index and Bibliography (Sports History Publishing, 2021), ISBN 9781898010135 £10.95. It is a very thorough look at the 300 issues of The Captain that were published.  There is a plethora of photographs of the various contributors, as well as covers, and informative essays on the magazine itself, but the heart of the book is the the contents listing of each issue, and the indexes of writers (one of "Major Writers"--which has biographies of the writers-- the other of "Other Writers" which just lists the volumes of The Captain in which each writer appears), and illustrators (similarly, the "Major Illustrators" section has biographies, while the "Other Illustrators" lists just names and appearances).  

There were a huge number of writers and illustrators that are represented in The Captain, but let me list here a selection of names that might interest Wormwoodiana readers:  Francis Henry Atkins (and other nom de plumes), Charles Beadle, H. Bedford-Jones, A.E. Bestall, John Buchan, A.M. Burrage, Ernest Favenc, Warwick Goble, Lucy Moberly, Frank C. Pape, Max Rittenberg, Herbert Vivian, F.A.M. Webster, and P.G. Wodehouse.  I was interested to see Ridgwell Cullum identified as a pseudonym (new to me) of Sidney Groves Burkhard, and while Patrick Vaux is correctly identified as a pseudonym of MacLaren Mein, one of his other pseudonyms, Nigel Tourneur, is described as a probably pen-name, but not identified with Mein.  

Anyway, there is a lot of information in this book to enjoy and digest in its nearly four hundred pages, much more than one might expect considering its remit of covering one magazine. Thereby it helps fill in details on many of the writers and illustrators who filled its pages.