Harper's Folly

The only prize I could claim with my ClubMom points was a magazine subscription, so I took Harper's. I remembered enjoying it in the early 1970s, even having a brief correspondence with the publisher, Lewis Lapham. He educated me about the large post cards which fall out of the magazine whenever it's lifted. "They're called tip-ins," he wrote after I complained that six of them fell out of a recent issue. He indicated that they were probably here to stay. Indeed. Two fell out of the August 2004 issue. That was fitting, because the magazine is about one third the size I remember. Lapham is still publisher.

I noticed a strange disclosure in the fine print of the magazine's Table of Contents. A large section called Readings consists of material from public domain sources, some of it reprinted without permission. I thought that odd. Then I visited the online version. Reprints from old issues of the magazine (it was founded in 1850) are arranged topically, but every page offers a hierarchical path, so the viewer knows exactly where she is. It seemed very logical to me, and all links I tried worked correctly. Some of the material exclusive to the website was the richest in links I've ever seen, like this.

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