Yellow Nineties 2.0 (1890s.ca) by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (review)

Reviewed by: Yellow Nineties 2.0 (1890s.ca) by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra Kathryn Holland (bio) Yellow Nineties 2.0 (1890s.ca) directed by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra Little magazines hold a particular allure as representatives of fin-desiècle print culture. Through such features as prices, design, and publication schedules, such periodicals pushed their first readers' expectations for the genre's balance of "materiality and immateriality, ephemerality and permanence" (Chapman 147). They have remained far from disposable, with legacies of form and content extended across decades. They belong, for instance, to a network of exchange also populated by modernist magazines attentive to them if not their direct heirs. John Lane, the publisher of several little magazines, highlighted its titles for readers, not despite but because of the conflicts editors and writers developed with those who came before. Lane advertised The Yellow Book on an inside cover of BLAST and nestled advertisements for both in the back cover of Form, first released in 1916, less than a year after BLAST folded (Binckes 7). Looking back on the establishment of the English Review from the vantage point of his 1921 memoir, Ford Madox Ford recalls his aim to launch "an aube-de-siècle Yellow Book," while Margaret Anderson wrote, in 1930, about factors in her decision to produce the Little Review despite financial risks. When friends offered the cost of producing the Yellow Book as a cautionary example, she replied, "Well, yes, look at the 'Yellow Book.' You can look at it on the shelves of almost any book lover, richly bound, and rated among his more precious possessions" (qtd. in Binckes 46–47). Yellow Nineties 2.0, the current phase of the open-access resource originally launched as The Yellow Nineties Online, brings swaths of periodical culture to life for researchers and students. Originally established by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra and Dennis Denisoff, with research teams based primarily at Toronto Metropolitan University, the first phase of this digital humanities (DH) project focused on the development of editions of The Pagan's sole issue (1892) and the thirteen-volume run of the Yellow Book (1894–97). Following this, it has grown via a more sophisticated interface, scholarship on its sources' contributors, and digital editions of the full runs of The Dial, The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The Green Sheaf, The Savoy, and The Venture: An Annual of Art and Literature, which together span 1892–1905. Alongside the site's Magazine Rack are its Database of Ornament, sharing and describing such textual features as headpieces, colophons, and borders; Biographies, a collection of essays about nearly one hundred authors and artists involved in the magazines' creation, written by scholars in and beyond the project; and the Yellow Nineties Personography, an affiliated initiative whose dataset identifies roles and relationships among contributors to the magazines. By remediating its eight central subjects and their systems of production and reception in its digital archive, (virtually) placing these primary texts in users' hands along [End Page 163] with expert commentary and tools for exploration, the project offers an effective argument about the little magazine as a vital, wide-ranging medium for late-Victorian messages. The interface is striking and informative throughout, facilitating users' meaningful explorations of the resource regardless of their levels of familiarity with digital scholarship. Issues of the little magazines and their textual ornaments are the most visually remarkable items on the site. But before encountering them, we are swiftly drawn in to the visual culture of the late 1800s via the homepage's background image, a sepia photo capturing a bustling city scene, with a streetlight and buses with advertisements for Kodak, Nestle, and Quaker Oats in its foreground; headers comprising cropped versions of a graphite portrait of Max Beerbohm and Henry Treffry Dunn's watercolour D.G. Rossetti and Theodore Watts-Dunton in the Sitting Room at Cheyne Walk; and Art Nouveau decorative initial letters structuring the Biographies' alphabetical index. Multiple versions of each magazine issue are available, leveraging features of digital publication that users can wield efficiently. HMTL versions of The Savoy, for instance, include links that enable connections not only between issues' tables of content and specific articles but also to other sections...

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