Ephemeris

[Ephemeris]

As far as a buisiness venture, I would accept paid ads from anyone, Camel, Copenhagen, Grizzly. I mean, smokeless tobacco, as a whole, does not have a magazine(that I have ever known of). And I think it should emcompass all of smokeless tobacco, if you want it to expand, and have wide appeal, and be profitable. But I would keep it balanced, with snus, nasal snuff, dip, and chew.

Hi Tom!

Our current ratio stands at 40% snuff, 40% snus, and the remaining 20% is split between chew, dip, pipe tobak, and other forms of tobacco.

We love all forms of smokeless tobacco, so you can always expect to see a variety of different products featured. But our hearts belong to snus and our minds belong to snuff, so they will always comprise a majority of the content.

Our magazine is also an open forum- we want to print the stuff that you want to see. If you want to see more loose-leaf chew reviews, let us know. If you want us to expand the pipe tobak section or do away with it altogether, then let us know that too. You can send all comments and criticism to letters@STephemeris.com.

[lxskllr]

I can respect that position regarding advertising. I'll take money from anyone, but not in exchange for positive words I don't believe. Have you considered an electronic edition in addition to print? I'm generally against physical media on principle. I like magazines a lot, but what happens is they aren't that great to begin with, and they get thrown out right away, or they're pretty good, so I save them for reference, but in actuality they just get squirreled away never to be opened again, and take up space. A PDF edition would be pretty sweet, and people could read them on computers or ebook readers.

[EricHill78]

I can respect that position regarding advertising. I'll take money from anyone, but not in exchange for positive words I don't believe. Have you considered an electronic edition in addition to print? I'm generally against physical media on principle. I like magazines a lot, but what happens is they aren't that great to begin with, and they get thrown out right away, or they're pretty good, so I save them for reference, but in actuality they just get squirreled away never to be opened again, and take up space. A PDF edition would be pretty sweet, and people could read them on computers or ebook readers.

I'm very suprised about your comment. Considering you allways comment about simpler times in the past... I didn't even think "ebook reader" was in your vocabulary lol.

With me I welcome a magazine with open arms. Something I can touch, flip through, and enjoy. To me there is a disconnect with PDF files web editions etc. I think the magazine is a great idea. Reminds me of when I was a kid and I'd pick up my monthly copy of "popular communications" which was about shortwave radio, scanners, etc. A magazine about snus and snuff is very exciting to me and I'll be subscribing soon.

[lxskllr]

I'm very suprised about your comment. Considering you allways comment about simpler times in the past... I didn't even think "ebook reader" was in your vocabulary lol.

Well, for better or worse, the past is gone. The way I see it, the new electronic lifestyle can help take some strain off of our resources. Instead of cutting down a tree, grinding it, pulping it, adding bleach, adding binders, pressing it, putting it into a ginormous roll, shipping it to a printer, covering it with not very nice substances, cutting it, folding it, stapling it, boxing it, shipping it to a distributor, mailing to the end user, end user reads, and then throws out, or recycles the magazine. OR, you can export as PDF, upload it to a server, download by the end user, the end user then saves it to his HD, or deletes it. Minimal resources get used in the last case, and we save time, fuel, and very few toxic substances get produced excepting the durable electronic goods that were already in use. I don't have an ebook reader, and will not likely get one, but I do have a netbook that would be very handy for reading a magazine on smokeless tobacco :^)

[EricHill78]

Point well taken my friend..

[Darwin]

You kids get off my lawn! But seriously folks actual printing on actual paper has a resonance and emotional satisfaction that electronic media never will. Of course magazines aren't books and are not in general meant to be kept forever but even so the very act of committing words to paper and distributing the result imbues those words with a heft and seriousness that a website simply cannot match. Any rag-tag shirt tail doofus wannabe scribe, like moi, can gin up a blog/website and a couple billion of the bloody things, 98 % of which are garbage of course, prove that blogs/websites may be easy and ubiquitous but they are usually far from clever, insightful, or worthy of anyone's time. The mere act of starting a magazine in this economic climate takes testes maximus compadre and should be supported with our encouragement and our inflata-bucks.

[Ephemeris]

Well put, Darwin. I could not have said it better myself.

If there seems to be a demand for it down the road, a digital edition of the magazine may come about in some fashion. But right now, we're only concentrating on printing a "real" magazine.

If I may, I'd like to point out that our magazine is engineered to last. We're not printing on cheap newsprint; the interior stock is 48 pound, acid-free, archival grade coated stock- it's guaranteed not to degrade under normal circumstances for 127 years. (Of course, none of us will be around to see how well that guarantee holds up, but hey...) Everything down to the rust-free staples that we use to bind the book is built around the goal of preservation. (I wanted a similar "eternity" stock for the front cover, but it is impossible to get a nice, glossy cover built around those specs. So, while the interior pages will probably last a couple of centuries, the cover might rot in about eighty years )

I understand that there will be the casual reader that simply picks up the book once or twice and then tosses it away or recycles it- which is fine by me. But I chose to print our magazine to these specifics because I want people to hold on to them. Some of the things that we have in store to reprint in the book have been out of circulation for hundreds of years, and they're not available in any other medium. The pages of the Ephemeris will serve to catalog these works, and make them available on a mass, affordable scale so that they won't be lost to the pages of history. In fact, I just dropped three hundred bucks on a newspaper from 1812 that had a nice write-up about snuff, just to put it in the magazine. It's the only known copy in existence.

Before the magazine came about, I toyed around with the idea of putting these archives on .pdf and just throwing them on the web, but that wouldn't guarantee that our great-grandchildren will necessarily have access to them. They belong in print, so that they stand a chance of surviving the impeding zombie holocaust, heh heh.

So while I want the magazine to be just as enjoyable for the casual reader as I do for the hardcore researcher, we are definitely geared towards the pack rats that want to collect and store our book for later reference. In fact, once we have a couple of years worth of issues built up, I want to issue an index every so often that references all the topics we've covered, so that if someone wants to find articles about, say, Horseshoe Snuff, they will know exactly which issues and pages to look for. This was something that National Geographic did for many years, and I found it invaluable for research purposes.

So, while we may resemble a classier Old Farmer's Almanac, we're really aspiring to be more like the Encyclopedia Britannica.

PS, I wanted to thank Darwin for starting this thread. I just hope that our first issue exceeds everyone's expectations. I promise that the second issue will be even bigger and better.

[deadohsky]

Looking forward to this myself; sounds very promising.

[Curtisp]

Testes Maximus?...that right there, was worth the price of admission.. Perhaps, Ephemeris, should consider Darwin as a contributory writer. That boy can scribe.

[tom502]

I just got the premire issue yesterday myself. And it's really well done, and mainly covers nasal snuff, and snus. It's a little non-pro in it's production, meaning it's not like a slick mag at the store, but not in a bad way at all, it's very well done, and obviously a labor of love. It has many good articles, and even some old adverts, and it's really thick, 80 pages, and it's rather cheap under $6, for being a niche mag.
Yeah, I am plugging it, but I am not a part of it, I just think this would interest members here, and it'd be sad if such an effort died out for lack of interest.

[snusgetter]

... Yeah, I am plugging it, but I am not a part of it, I just think this would interest members here, and it'd be sad if such an effort died out for lack of interest.

Thanks for bumping this thread.

I'd planned on ordering and completely forgot about it.


Now on order and anxiously awaiting the premiere issue.

[chadizzy1]

Thanks for bumping this thread.

I'd planned on ordering and completely forgot about it.


Now on order and anxiously awaiting the premiere issue.

I wanted to write up a little something about it just to voice my thoughts on it. At first, I didn't know what to expect. I thought it was going to be something like my website or Larry's website but just in a publication. I couldn't have been more wrong - it's a really cool publication, and really well put together. Feck & Mick from SnusCENTRAL have put something really neat together. The articles are superb, the layout is very unique and fresh, and the content couldn't be better. It has a cool retro feel to it. I know I often read snus sites/forums on my iPhone, but this makes a neat little book to keep with me to have something to read to pass time. If you haven't subscribed yet - check it out. Head over to the website for The Snuff Taker's Ephemeris and sign up.

http://www.stephemeris.com/

[TBD]

The first issue is now sold out. We really didn't expect this level of interest. BUT we say Thank you all the same. Next issue we will be printing more copies.

[deadohsky]

I spaced this off unfortunately and will have to order it once back issues are available.

[snusgetter]

The first issue is now sold out. We really didn't expect this level of interest. BUT we say Thank you all the same. Next issue we will be printing more copies.

I ordered the Premiere Issue Nov 2 and received confirmation from PayPal...

You sent a payment of $4.99 USD to ST Ephemeris.
Issue Number One
Quantity: One copy

I certainly hope you hadn't sold out at that point!!