It really is a shame this “magazine of the arts” is no longer produced. Hardbound and with 100+ pages of topics that span history, art, literature, and the modern world, it’s gorgeous.

In this issue a couple of the articles that stood out were on Daniel Defoe (slick businessman whose speculations would squander his wife’s fortune and leave him bankrupt at 32; government spy; satirist; and author of famous novels but not until age 60, and viewed as pulp fiction in his day) and Pablo Picasso (written while Picasso was still alive, and though I believe the author of the article was a bit too analytical and over-emphasized Guernica, it was still nice to see the prints included). The short non-fictional account of interactions with the locals in Pakistan by an Englishman living there, ‘A Horse at Islamabad Villa’, is also amusing.

The real star, however, was ‘The Merchandise was Human’, about the centuries long slave trade through the interior of Africa, run by Arabs, but feeding Western demand such that the entire world was culpable. Aside from the rationalizations from the time and eyewitness accounts of barbarity in treks across the Sahara desert to the port cities of Tangier, Tunis, Tripoli, and Benghazi , the sheer numbers are staggering: over four and a half centuries, the author puts the conservative total number at 12 million slaves imported into places like Hispaniola and the United States, and points out an estimate for the losses incurred before slaves reached the coast of Africa (even before getting on the slave ships to cross the ocean) at about ten to one . That’s upward of 120 million lives, which translates to 730 a day. For 450 years. ( )

a very good issue ( )