Читать книгу The Original Stephen Leacock - Стивен Ликок - Страница 3

Table of Contents

In the first half of the twentieth century, periodicals of all kinds abounded. Authors would commonly publish in those periodicals first: either a short story, or a serialized novel. Commonly, their published works would be spread over many magazines.

Stephen Leacock published many works of humour in the short story form. These were published in various magazines, typically one or two magazine pages, sometimes with little pieces scattered through the end pages of the magazine, embedded in the advertising. They were then collected, with one work typically giving the collection its name. Of course, this is the format that virtually all Leacock affictionados are familiar with. In Leacock’s case, some were collected into multiple collections, or re-collected many times.

However, these stories were frequently modified. The name was frequently changed; but sometimes the contents were changed as well. For example, in one work investigated, the character A Philanthropist was changed into A Lady Pacifist. Were Lady Pacifists more in vogue to make fun of?

The magazines usually had a staff illustrator. Most of Leacock's works published in magazines had one or more illustrations. These illustrations were not reproduced in the collections you have read. They have been included here, when copyright permits. In this volume, the majority of the stories are illustrated by Charles William Jefferys (see

http://www.cwjefferys.ca

).

Note that the original magazines were severely discoloured, and hence there has been significant image editing in an attempt to remove the yellowing and fading. This obviously requires a certain amount of judgement, what is discolouration, and what is actually grey background by the artist?

All of the illustrators have now entered the public domain in Canada.

The works collected in this volume are all from The Century Magazine or Maclean’s, published in the years 1913 through 1919. The Century Magazine, an American publication, existed from 1881 until 1930, when it merged with The Forum, which itself ceased publication in 1950. Maclean’s is still with us.

Beware, some of these works would not be considered politically correct these days! We make no attempt at censorship, but give you the original words.

As these stories appeared in different magazines, they had different editors, with different editing styles, and different typographical conventions. No attempt has been made to make them consistent; only obvious printer or typographical errors have been corrected.