Since its first issue in 1877, the Argonaut has published this problem. The Bear washed out to sea is floating on the back of a walrus, in the Pacific Ocean. He is thinking that if he devours it he will drown. If he remains on the walrus’s back, he will die of starvation. What to do?
About Us
The Argonaut goes on the Web, not entirely unnaturally in the cyclical order of things. When the Argonaut birthed, in 1877, in San Francisco, it was handset letter by letter from the printer’s case. A bottle of rye whiskey and a revolver were the third arm of frontier publishing. Many printers composed their own words as they set them in type, the typesetter became a publisher, and a century and a half later, the Internet enables a writer to punch in his words and have them in the electronic equivalent of print. Thus the Argonaut has come full circle.
The annals of journalism are filled with many tall tales, but there are more yarns about upstart’s than resurrections. The Argonaut is in the later category.It has been resurrected. This old wheeze was published in Frisco from the champagne days of 1877 until it halted from a deserved exhaustion in 1956. It was resuscitated by the San Francisco journalist Warren Hinckle in 1991 and has been published since in dismayingly different formats, mass distribution tabloid newspaper,magazine slick, printed and bound trade paperback, whatever worked. There is in our lengthy historie more than an element of eccentricity. Previous publishers of the Argonaut have included in their vaulted ranks real estate promoters, spiritualists and believers in the Christian Science religion. The current publisher insists on going everywhere with his basset hound, like Thurber’s New Yorker cartoon Man Walks Into Bar With Dog.
Argonaut’s first editor, from 1877 to circa 1879, was the genius misanthrope Ambrose Bierce, although most books on western history will dutifully record that the first editors were Frank M. Pixley and Fred M. Somers. That would be wrong. Pixle and Somers owned the press and the type cases in fee simple but they were mean frontier drunks, insufferable sots who were pro-railroad and anti-labor, and anti-Chinese and anti-Irish to boot. They briefly darkened the office door and were about town all day Seeing The Elephant, the term of art for activities inpost Gold Rush San Francisco which largely consisted of consuming fifty drinks a day in thirty bars. It was left to their employee, the young Bierce, to write and edit the whole damn thing every week. Bierce took delight in vilifying his bosses’ bigotry and he took the contrary editorial positions in the Argonaut,defending the Celestials and the sons of Erin. The publishers named on the masthead spent the coin but paid casual attention to the content of their paper under Bierce.
The two splendid years Bierce wrote and edited the Argonaut were the most progressive in his increasingly mordant and sour political history. The overworked Bierce struck back at the Argonaut’s besotted owners through the device of the epitaph coined in anticipation of the passing of an enemy: HERE LIES FRANK PIXLEY, AS USUAL, he wrote. Bierce also hands-down beat the better-known Stephen Crane in the ferocity of his anti-war stories about the Civil War.
The Argonaut will continue to publish in print but in the interest of saving trees and making money will devote considerable editorial energies to its web editions. The site is called www. Argonaut360 simply because there are too many pawn shops and such called Argonaut for that to be an exclusive domain on the Internet. The web Argonaut we suspect will break the cereal bowl of web site design by favoring long text and commingling 19th century style multi- deck headlines with 21st century outsider art, but what to do; this journal since the 1800’s has been, almost steadily, on the quirky side.From The Argonaut’s p.o.v, San Francisco is the Queen City of the Pacific Rim, and not because of our homogenized and beloved gay population. The way we see it, San Francisco is the prism for seeing the global connections of Latin America, Asia and the American West. These connections while historic are acutely cutting edge contemporary in terms of cuisine, art, architecture, living and life styles and the rest of the grand bundle that is Now.
So there you have it, or us, for what it is. The rest is up to Providence, and the whimsy of deadlines.
