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 orderof things. When the Argonaut birthed, in 1877, in San Francisco, it was handsetletter by letter from the printer’s case. A bottle of rye whiskey and a revolverwere the third arm of frontier publishing. Many printers composed their own wordsas they set them in type, the typesetter became a publisher, and a century anda half later, the Internet enables a writer to punch in his words and have themin 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 moreyarns about startups than resurrections. The Argonaut is in the later category.It has been resurrected. This old wheeze was published in Frisco from the champagnedays of 1877 until it halted from a deserved exhaustion in 1956. It was resuscitatedby the San Francisco journalist Warren Hinckle in 1991 and has been publishedsince in dismayingly different formats, mass distribution tabloid newspaper,magazine slick, printed and bound trade paperback, whatever worked. There isin our lengthy historie more than an element of eccentricity. Previous publishersof 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, andanti-Chinese and anti-Irish to boot. They briefly darkened the office door andwere about town all day Seeing The Elephant, the term of art for activities inpost Gold Rush San Francisco which largely consisted of consuming fifty drinksa day in thirty bars. It was left to their employee, the young Bierce, to writeand edit the whole damn thing every week. Bierce took delight in vilifying hisbosses’ bigotry and he took the contrary editorial positions in the Argonaut,defending the Celestials and the sons of Erin. The publishers named on the mastheadspent the coin but paid casual attention to the content of their paper underBierce.

 

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 savingtrees and making money will devote considerable editorial energies to its webeditions. The site is called www. Argonaut360 simply because there are too manypawn shops and such called Argonaut for that to be an exclusive domain on theInternet. The web Argonaut we suspect will break the cereal bowl of web sitedesign 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 1800shas 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 seeingthe 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 isNow.

 

So there you have it, or us, for what it is. The rest is up to Providence, andthe whimsy of deadlines.