The Tatler
The Tatler‘s clever synthesis, appropriation, extension and parody of these elements created a new form of journalism that has endured to the present.
The Tatler was published until 2 January 1712, with 271 issues in all. After the first 64 issues, Steele dropped the sections where he reprinted actual news of the day, leaving that to the other newspapers and focusing more kinds of things that readers had responded to, the gossip and opinion sections. The journal began to incorporate letters from its readers, creating a feed-back loop of information exchange. The journal was gathered up and reprinted in bound volumes almost immediately, and continued to be printed in this way for the next century and a half (at least). Here we print a small number issues individually, to get the sense of reading them as discrete, singular objects as well as part of a larger whole.