In 1971, William Powell wrote the Anarchist Cookbook, the next 40 years are a tale of regret and IP sales.

In 1989—not the early 1980s, as Powell wrote—Lyle Stuart sold his publishing house to the Carol Management Corporation for $12 million. A man named Steve Schragis was in charge of the new imprint, which focused on controversial books; one title, Final Exit, instructed people on how to kill themselves. But Schragis objected to The Anarchist Cookbook, saying it had “no positive purpose,” and declined to reissue it. So Stuart bought the title back for $75,000 and published it under his new company, Barricade Books. At some point during this back and forth, Powell signed over rights to future royalties, telling me that Stuart sent him a check for $5,000.

Two of my closest friends Heather Faulkner and Ginger Sendalova left Vancouver in the late 90s, jumping into the void that was post-Communist Czechoslovakia. Both had secured positions at the romantic sounding Prague Post.

After moving to London in 1999, and thanks to cheap flights by the now-defunct Go, I probably visited them a dozen times in two years, spending hours and hours in the Post‘s offices. It looked like every student newspaper office that I have every visited, and probably ran on the same budget, but the Post always punched far above its weight in news, photography and design, outclassing even the International Herald Tribune and The European.

But my friends were working for the winner in a newspaper war over the hearts and minds of a generation of Western 20-whatevers who had come seeking what Post editor-in-chief Alan Levy called “the Left Bank of the ’90s.”

“For some of us, Prague is Second Chance City; for others a new frontier where anything goes, everything goes, and, often enough, nothing works. Yesterday is long gone, today is nebulous, and who knows about tomorrow, but, somewhere within each of us, we all know that we are living in a historic place at a historic time.“—The Prague Post, October 1, 1991 (first issue)

Here, Jacques Poitras, talks about the paper that lost, Prognosis and what might have been.

“These American kids start the first English-language newspaper. … It can’t help but thrive, right?” Welch’s friend, Ken Layne, told me in an e-mail in 1995. “It sputters along for several years, getting a million dollars in free press, no business plan, no financial plan, no discipline, just bumbling along, just like all of Prague is doing. And just like the fucking Communists, Prognosis is living off subsidies,” a reference to the money from relatives and foundations in the United States. “Meanwhile, the Czechs figure it all out. They toss away a lifetime of anti-capitalist bullshit and turn Prague into a fucking money machine. Everybody figures out how to run a business, how to make cash, how to succeed — everybody but these American kids who refuse to even acknowledge the need for money, for success.

“If [Post publisher] Lisa Frankenberg is your villain,” Layne added, “you’ve bought into the biggest piece of fabricated history ever. If they had figured out how to use Lisa’s smarts … Prognosis would be a thriving media empire today instead of a dead newspaper fondly remembered by fifty people. The results speak for themselves. Lisa is no monster. A hundred other people have felt the same way about the half-ass manner in which Prognosis was run.”

— Prague Reverb: Revisiting an American Newspaper War Abroad

Here’s my prediction to the world: Uber will be permitted in Vancouver approximately 1 April, 2015.

How do I forecast with such accurate precision? Because that’s two weeks after thousands of Ted Conference attendees arrive, pull out their phones, and then look at the Provincial and City officials as if they were covered in hayseed.

Henry Beard co-founded the National Lampoon in 1970 then insisted on a buyout in 1975 and never contributed again. He has almost never spoken publicly about the NatLamp years – but here’s a great interview from Spltsider.

On advertisers:

The people who started the National Lampoon were very fortunate. We came along at a very particular time. All the restraints were coming loose, it was probably one of the last times when you could start a monthly magazine… For a long time we couldn’t get advertising. The advertisers would say, “I’m not going to advertise in that disgusting magazine.” But that soon changed. At 295,000 it was disgusting. At 305,000 it was an important audience that needed to be reached on its own terms.

Via Mark’s Very Large

When the set designers of Blade Runner needed to stock a news agent in a background street scene they created their own range of magazines from the future. Look forward to subscribing to Kill, Moni, Zord, Horn, Creative Evolution, and Dorgon magazines.

Horses, of courses.
Via Next Draft

Reuters

“There’s nothing wrong with the company as it exists right now,” Heins said on Canadian Broadcasting Corp’s Metro Morning radio show.

“I’m not talking about the company as I, kind of, took it over six months ago. I’m talking about the company (in the) state it’s in right now.”

H/T Amil

St. Peter’s in Petersham, London, could never be so full as it is on each 1 July, when the little building is full of displaced Canadians making a rare church visit to watch wreaths be laid upon Captain George Vancouver’s grave.

Vancouver didn’t discover his namesake city, the First Nations have lived there for thousands of years. He didn’t found the townsite—that occurred in 1862, 64 years after his death. He wasn’t even the first choice for the name, Hastings came first then Granville. But the Canadian Pacific Railway land speculators thought that was a hint of grandeur in the name Vancouver and that’s what they chose for their new end-of-the-line station in 1886.

We took the District Line to Richmond then, mostly, walked along the Thames to Petersham, and to St. Peter’s. Here is a short video I took of the memorial service for Vancouver’s Megaphone Magazine.

Afterwards, we walked up the back way from Petersham, up Richmond Hill to the terrace and found that we were looking at this scene from our seat at the Roebuck Pub.

Der Speigel on Le Canard Enchaîné

Canard, on the other hand, France’s only satirical weekly newspaper, is doing well in this ailing country. Circulation went up by 32 percent in the first two years after Sarkozy’s inauguration, and thanks the country’s numerous scandals it now prints 700,000 copies per week. Net profit was roughly €5 million ($6.9 million) in 2009. For decades, the paper has covered France’s scandals with credible and reliable reporting, while at the same time publishing decidedly malicious cartoons, tongue-in-cheek opinion pieces and fictitious columns by politicians.

The paper is owned by its editors and has an incredible cash reserve and property holding of €110 million.