An Index to Saturday Night: The First Fifty Years 1887-1937

Dean Tudor is a journalism professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute and founding editor of the CBRA.

Saturday Night is the longest continually published magazine in Canada. Its centennial year was 1987. Regular indexing began in January 1938 when the Canadian Periodical Index began publication. Thus, until now, the first 50 years of Saturday Night were unindexed. Heggie and her team of indexers have now extended the indexing to the period from issue one, when the magazine was a weekly (December 3, 1887), up to Christmas 1937 by which time it was an established monthly. There are, of course, microfilmed copies of the entire run in many academic libraries in North America. With this index there should be a demand for more sets, especially from American universities that have Canadian Studies programs.

Saturday Night is, of course, a magazine of the arts. It began as a weekly newspaper, not particularly about the arts, but published on Saturday night (hence the name) for the worker to read after work (remember, people worked six days a week back then). It evolved into its current mix of contemporary affairs, commentary, financial analysis, criticism, short stories, poetry, reviews, and the reproduction of Canadian art works. All of this is revealed through the 60,300 citations here, which cover all signed articles, lead editorials, and unsigned articles over 200 words. The index itself is a dictionary-arranged mix of authors, subjects, and form headings (poetry, reviews, short stories, etc.), with appropriate cross-references.