The Whispering Swarm Read Online Free PDF

primarily a commercial printer who had sought higher profits in publishing. That dream had faded by the time I turned up. He knew I was prepared to work for a much lower wage than an older journalist! My enthusiasm might prove profitable. As it turned out, he was right!
    I was responsible for the whole magazine. I didn’t just make the old American Sunday Tarzan comic strip pages fit our quarto format, sometimes with drastic surgery and amateurish redrawing, I also commissioned features, fiction, illustrations and our back-pages comics serial, sometimes bought from Italy, sometimes commissioned. Through my fanzine contacts I had a large pool of talented semiprofessionals to draw from. They soon started appearing regularly in Tarzan . By 1957 I was producing a semijuvenile version of the US pulp magazines I loved and which were dying in the US. The circulation began to improve. Donald Peters cheered up a little.
    They gave me an assistant, a septuagenarian Fleet Street man, a subeditor all his life who hated everything I did. He particularly hated fantasy and science fiction, believing it ‘unwholesome’. He came in twice a week to Brook Street and took the office at the farthest end of the narrow building piled with bales of Westworld’s unsold publications and divided up into mysterious spaces whose original function was only remembered by the accounts people and Donald F. Peters, our sad-eyed boss, who had designed them in more optimistic times. Sometimes, if I was alone in the office and had a bit of a hangover, I slept on top of unsold bales of Marvelman, Pecos Bill and various reprints of other Italian comics stored in the basement. I can smell their musty, yellowing paper to this day! They hadn’t been a great success in the UK market.
    My ancient assistant’s name was Reginald ‘Sammy’ Samuels. Mostly he did paste-up. His scissors and can of Cow gum seemed a comfort to him. He used shirt suspenders and the green eyeshade Bob Greenway had left behind. He wore a dark suit, shiny at knees and elbows, a frayed shirt, a greasy bow tie and a tobacco-stained waistcoat. He smelled a little sour. He had a long, unhappy face and was bent over with scoliosis. His skin fell in long, discoloured facial curtains which the nicotine from his cigarettes, smoked in long holders, had tanned kipper-gold. I think they paid him less than I got. I found it a little awkward, being the boss of a much older man, and he didn’t much like it, either. I would introduce him as our senior editor. He taught me some of the tricks of the trade but probably his most useful tip was how to survive on very little money. At lunch, for instance, he would order two rounds of toast at our nearby greasy spoon round the corner in Grays Inn Road. When the toast arrived he shook salt onto one piece and sugar on the other. ‘There you are,’ he said, ‘the savoury course and the sweet course, and all for threepence!’ When broke I frequently used his tip. I already knew how to make a cheap sandwich from a bread roll and a portion of Branston pickle in Lyons teashops!
    I seemed to have a knack for the work. I could quickly eyeball a piece of copy and know how much of the page it would fill. Even Sammy couldn’t do that as well. He showed me how to draw a title and embellish it to look professional, if a little old-fashioned, and passed along his prowess as a proofreader. I learned the trick of bulking out a short piece and cramming in a long one.
    We got our typesetting done by Olympic in Old Bailey. They occupied a basement not far from the courts. I would deliver next week’s copy on Wednesday and check it over on Thursday. The typesetters would photograph it and send it to our lithograph printers in St Albans. They would already have the pictures and layouts. The printed copy had to be turned around quickly to coincide with the existing pasted-up pages.
    Which was how I met Friar Isidore.
    Because I was