Lilliput is one of those interesting little magazines that I've come across a number of times over the years. It began in 1937, and ended in 1960. Many prominent and lesser-known authors active during those years appeared in its pages. I think I first looked into it because I desired some possibly uncollected pieces by Lord Dunsany, who had six contributions to the magazine. Three stories (two Jorkens tales) appeared in 1939; and two more Jorkens tales appeared in 1952 and 1953. In 1940 he contributed to a whimsical symposium on "What I Want After the War". (One of Dunsany's comments: "I should like to see cocktails utterly eradicated.")
T.H. White had two short stories published in 1954, and a third in 1957 (all three have been collected in The Maharajah and Other Stories from 1981). Thirteen of Maurice Richardson's comedic Engelbrecht tales (about a surreal dwarf boxer) first appeared in 1946 through 1950; a collection of fifteen stories was published as The Exploits of Engelbrecht in 1950. (It was a favored book by J.G. Ballard.) Richardson contributed many other items to Lilliput. Julian Symons, in his obituary of Richardson in The Times of London, noted that "his most astonishing achievement . . . was that of writing the magazine Lilliput for a time almost singlehanded, using a half a dozen different pseudonyms for writing knowledgeable articles about a variety of subjects" (5 October 1978).
Now Chris Harte has published Lilliput Magazine: 1937-1960: A History and Bibliography, an oversized 362 page volume with multiple chapters of interest, a history of the magazine, the contents of each issue, indices of contributors, artists, etc, and lots of photographs of the people involved. It's worth supporting comprehensive work like this. The publisher is Sports History Publishing, and the ISBN 9781898010180.
Chris Harte has three other magazine histories/bibliographies that I've written about before.
1. The Captain
A few issues had contributions by Montague Summers and Aleister Crowley.
ReplyDeleteIndeed they did!
ReplyDeleteIn a library book sale room, I recently picked up a copy of a The Lilliput Annual for, I think, 1941, partly to find out more about the magazine, which I've often heard spoken of but never seen. Haven't yet spent any time with it, but look forward to doing so. Harte's book sounds deeply appealing, but at roughly $50 or $60, I'll hold off for now. That could change after I spend more time actually looking at some issues of the magazine.
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