The Reissue

For some unknown reason I kept a pristine second copy of each 
Rag as it came out, and filed it away for posterity in a succession 
of lofts. Worried that rodents, bad winters and my own 
approaching decrepitude might lose what appeared to be (if 
nothing else) an interesting collection, I came up with the bright 
idea of scanning it and leaving the results somewhere safe. From 
there, the decision to set up a website and reissue the Rag on a 
fortnightly basis, each issue on its 27th anniversary, then became 
inevitable.

We had a brief conversation on FB recently, about what we’d say 
to our former selves, if we could borrow a time machine for the 
afternoon. In retrospect, what I would say is nothing deep:

•	Do not print it on SRA3 – you may be saving yourselves 
printing costs now, but I’m going to have a bit of fun in 30 
years time, locating a scanner for paper that large. (And my 
thanks to Argyle Street Housing Co-operative in Cambridge, 
for coming up trumps on this one.)
•	Do not use italic golfballs. Ever. They look nasty anyway and 
for some reason that I cannot explain no modern OCR 
software can read them back.
•	Do not imagine that hand-writing the Going Out guide for 18 
months was cute. I really got fed up with retyping that.

So, what is now on readings-only-newspaper.org? It’s 138(?) 
issues (plus some number of Collective meetings) as PDFs and 
hand-corrected OCR text. Each one is accompanied by a pithy 
summary which I write and which oddly usually mirrors 
contemporary events – the names might have changed but few of 
the issues have. Recently I’ve added a Google search bar, and 
we’re collectively undecided whether or not we want to keep it.

Talking of collectives: for feedback purposes I published the email 
address second-collective@readings-only-newspaper.org, which 
was a bit of a cheek seeing as it was only me, just to see what 
would happen. Nobody ever complained – were you all asleep or 
was this not as out of order as I thought it was?

I’d like to say I changed nothing as I went, but that’s not quite the 
case. Often I had to replace a smudge with the word “illegible”. 
Once I removed a derogatory racist term from a puff-piece. And 
one article turned out (in retrospect – we had no way of knowing at 
the time) to be an invitation for vulnerable teenagers to hand 
themselves over to paedophiles, and I felt obliged to comment 
about that inline.

I had no idea how to publicise what I’d done, so I just put content 
onto the web and reckoned I’d think abut that problem later. No 
need. Google found the site without me lifting a finger, and people 
must have been searching for it, because before I knew what I had 
26 subscribers and now, partially as a result of the reissue, here 
we all are.

I can go into fine details later for anyone who wants, but the site is 
hosted on machines which run by friends of mine; I have to pay a 
small fee every five years for the domain name but there are zero 
other costs; the future of the site is assured for some time to come; 
and I have left instructions for people in case I am suddenly no 
longer available to look after it.

I would like to see the site expanded. I hope material from today 
will end up there but that need not be the end of it. I am open to 
ideas. Maybe the Rag will be relaunched one day, and surely if so 
it will only ever be online? If so, its home is already waiting for us.

Finally, this was clearly a labour of love, not to mention an excuse 
to wallow in early 1980s popular music every second Saturday 
morning for six years. And I need to say a massive thanks to the 
person who said “yes, go ahead and do it” and then didn’t object 
massively when the time demands of this crazy project got out of 
hand.