Faithful Reproduction

On the cover is a steel engraving of South Carolina's Governor--as he appeared in 1861. Inside are maps and pictures of Charleston Harbor and a side view of Star of the West, the side-wheel steamship that was standing up the Charleston channel on Jan. 9, 1861 when it became the first target of the Civil War. A story on page 2 lists the principal Southern forts; on the back cover, Ballou Brothers, a New York concern, offers French yoke shirts at $12 a dozen. Nothing in the magazine could be considered timely, but last week 1,600 subscribers studied it as avidly as their morning papers. What they were reading was a faithful reproduction of Harper's Weekly, a 19th century publication that rose and prospered more than a century ago.

Its resurrection is the work of David E. Archie, 35, an Iowa journalist and part-time history buff. Last year, poring over back copies of Harper's Weekly in search of picture material for The lowan, a bimonthly magazine that he publishes in Shenandoah, Archie decided that Harper's authentic record of the Civil War might bear repetition during the war's centennial years. When a test mailing drew an enthusiastic response, he was in business.

Archie solicited reissue rights from Harper & Bros., the publishing firm that started Harper's Weekly in 1857. Harper agreed, and last December Archie sent the first reprint issue to some 1,000 libraries, schools, historians and antiquarians willing to pay the subscription rate of $12 a year.

Even at that price, the magazine is a bargain. Along with a faithful chronicle of the Civil War, its reprint readers will get a healthy dose of contemporary literature, including serial installments of Dickens' Great Expectations. If the resurrection outlasts the Civil War period (the weekly died in 1916), readers will also see some of the best work of Cartoonist Thomas Nast, whose Tammany tiger and Republican elephant put in early appearances in the magazine.

Since the subscription list has passed 2,500 and is still growing, Archie hopes to keep Harper's Weekly from dying a premature second death. He even has plans to revive a second 19th century journal: Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, which flourished from 1855 to 1891.

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