The Scrapbook fondly remembers the birth of this magazine in the long ago summer of 1995. We had previously worked at four small magazines and considered it something of a vocation. Those who share the vocation, or who know something of the magazine business, will understand our smirk when a colleague at the think tank where we were then marking time said that this was a great opportunity (true) and that by getting in on the ground floor of a new publication, we would be “set for life” (laughably, hilariously optimistic).
And yet here we are, if not quite “set for life,” which nobody ever is in the notoriously unsettled world of periodical publishing, nonetheless about to watch the 1,000th issue of The Weekly Standard roll off the presses. A small celebration therefore seemed in order.
So we have reprinted elsewhere in this issue some of our favorite caricatures and parodies from those 999 issues, which we hope our loyal longtime readers will enjoy seeing again, like a good friend from days gone by. And perhaps new readers will be enticed by them into our archives at weeklystandard.com, where treasure awaits . . . treasure amid lots of dross, if we’re being honest.
Journalism is notoriously perishable—the “first rough draft of history” is how figures in the trade put it in their self-important moments (i.e., all the time). And we all know where rough drafts belong: in the recycling bin. Or, these days, effaced immediately by the delete key. At roughly 25,000 words per issue, a lot of what we published is now dated and sometimes spectacularly wrong. People (you know who you are) occasionally like to point this out to us, to which The Scrapbook always replies, “Yes, but it was true when published!”
The work of our artists and parodists, on the other hand, seems to retain all its charm and vibrancy. We’re not sure why, but we hope you agree. A suitable topic to revisit, perhaps on the occasion of our 2,000th issue.
