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DISTRIBUTION

                                             October 17, 2008

  If information/communication matters, then
  media matters, and if media matters then the
  the nuts-and-bolts of the mechanisms that         (the bits-and-flips?)
  underly the media are critical: any media is
  a confluence of technical, legal and economic
  structures, as well as the social quirks of
  the people working the system.

  One of the virtues of Gerard Jones book             "Men of Tomorrow" (2004)
  is it's side-trips into the details of               by Gerard Jones
  the magazine distribution business.
                                                          MEN_OF_TOMORROW

     Gerard Jones was apparently
     working largely from interviews
     he conducted with one person:

     "Michael Feldman, a publisher and journalist who has traced
     some of the mysterious lines of magazine ditribution,
     maintains that Eastern News was 'a major nexus for an
     important, undocumented alternative culture in early 20th
     Century America.'  In additon to Gernsback's vehicles, Eastern
     handled feminist journals, spiritualist magazines, and
     _Psychology_ and _Sex Monthly_ ... Gernsback ..  probably
     continued to sell electrical gadgets and other small consumer
     goods long after he entered publishing and may have introduced
     Eastern News to the business of distributing other products to
     drug stores and smoke shops along with their magazines.  It
     was in that business, Feldman has concluded, that Gernsback,
     Eastern, and Harry Donenfeld overlapped with a mysterious but
     ubiquitous figure of the magazine boom named Harold Hersey and
     his lover, Margaret Sanger."

            All from p.56 of the hardback edition: this is
            interesting material, but the language is
            remarkably tentative.  "Feldman has concluded",
            but Jones makes it sound like he has nothing
            definite to use for a conclusion.

            Jones goes on with a thumbnail sketch of Margaret
            Sanger, the early feminist activist and proponent
            of birth control.  Hersey was one of Sanger's
            lovers (along with H.G. Wells and Havelock Ellis)
            a poet turned publisher who helped her develop
            her business distributing sex ed materials and
            contraceptives.

     "... Margaret Sanger's condoms, Hugo Gernsback's
     science fiction, and Frank Costello's whisky could
     ride together in trucks and on trains and through
     post offices where the inspectors were on the take."
                      -- p. 57



             We find things like this fascinating
             because we normally subdivide our
             knowledge of the world into standard
             categories -- but the world is one,
             and it often happens that there are
             many sideways connections across the
             boundaries of our standard divisons.

             That such sideways connections can
             be found isn't at all remarkable,
             really -- the fact that we find them
             so indicates just how seriously we
             take that hierarchy of subjects.

             We really should know better.


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