Photo by Kevin Gordon, obtained from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Zigzags#/media/File:Zig-Zags_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1161095.jpg
As this cleverly-captured image demonstrates, we find zig-zag or alternating patterns all around us. They can be used to warn – of an approaching pedestrian crossing as part of road safety. They can be used to improve stability, in structures such as fences or screens. Zig-zags can also be metaphors for unreliability or inability to stick to a chosen course – as with U-turns, these are viewed negatively. Zig-zag has also been the title of two periodicals, published around a hundred years apart. One was a late-1960s magazine devoted to British rock music, started by Pete Frame – who became especially famous for his genealogical charts of rock band members and iterations. You can read a bit about Zig-zag here: https://www.beatchapter.com/zigzag-magazine-105-c.asp The earlier one, which was only in print for a few months in 1872, has proved much more difficult to track down.
It exists in a list of British Museum newspaper holdings published in 1905, but not in the current newspaper catalogues. I presumed it must have been lost to the collections between then and now. It is notably absent from the British Library’s extensive index of British and Irish newspaper titles. This itself is hardly a surprise – by the time the British Newspaper Library moved from Colindale to Boston Spa, some of the archived volumes had deteriorated beyond use, and Zig-zag may have been one such. (See this article amongst many others about the relocation: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/jan/11/british-library-colindale-final-chapter. This does not, though, explain its absence from the catalogue.
Given that my research project concerns the most ephemeral of ephemera – the short-lived papers that individually seem insignificant but which, collectively, comprise a huge proportion of nineteenth-century newspapers – this matters. It is the final and rather unusual stage in a marriage story, one in which a newspaper that ran for some seventeen years (the Illustrated Times, which Henry Vizetelly launched as a competitor to Herbert Ingram’s Illustrated London News) absorbing a rival, Picture Times, within its first year in print. This followed a well-established pattern of two periodicals starting out around the same time, one being absorbed into another which continues for a relatively long time in print. What is unusual is that, in its final number on 2nd March 1872, the Illustrated Times prints a note ‘to our readers’ on the front page, stating ‘This is the last number of the ILLUSTRATED TIMES (as the ILLUSTRATED TIMES), which has been absorbed by its younger and cheaper rival – ZIG-ZAG, ‘Tis the way of the world that the young should push the elders from their stools.’[1]
What I want to know, in order to corroborate this version of events and complete the circle of knowledge, is what (if any) reference was made in the young periodical Zig-Zag to this situation. And this is where I come back to the problem; it does not appear in the British Library’s newspaper catalogue. As it had such a brief span, it’s unlikely to have appeared anywhere else and was not listed in 1905 as having been incorporated into another title.
So, what I have here is a fairly unusual example of a quite long-running (therefore conventionally ‘successful’) publication being absorbed into a new, untried one that, in the event, was very short-lived. To examine this story to its logical end, I need to know more about Zig-Zag, That seemed to be impossible – until one of my fantastic supervisors read the original version of this blog and was able to put me on its track. It turns out that, probably during the major move from Colindale to Boston Spa noted above, some titles were reclassified. In this case, Zig-zag is now listed with journals, not newspapers. Just like that line from the film Raiders of the Lost Ark: I was looking in the wrong place! Such are the frustrations of historical research and the abrupt changes of direction that mirror the zig-zag pattern! In this case, I have now zig-zagged back into a more hopeful place. Although I can’t immediately access the title, I know it’s there and can be found.
[1] Illustrated Times, 02/03/1872, p.1