Baker and Confectioner (1897)

For the Zoom and Browse Metabotnik of the entire 1897 volume of the Baker and Confectioner, click here.

The volume on this site dates from 1897, but the Baker and Confectioner had started in 1892. What we have here is a scan of volume 10.

The Baker and Confectioner proudly defined itself in its illustrated masthead as an “independent newspaper and trades journal” and announced its monthly circulation figures (over 6000 a week) in a prominent position on its front page. For around 16 pages of content and up to 20 pages of adverts (the number of pages varied), it cost the purchaser a penny a week.

As always with trade periodicals, it was the advertising which would have brought in by far the greatest proportion of income (a circulation of 6000 at 1d each would only have generated £25 income a week – probably not even enough to cover the costs of printing, let alone pay the editor or the other staff on the journal). It would be great to work out how much income all the adverts would have brought in, but the journal doesn’t tell us what its advertising rates were so we can’t work it out: one of the “Business Notices” on the first page of each issue tells us that the advertising charges for products were available only on application (we are told, though, that job adverts cost a penny for every 4 words with a minimum costs of 6d, but such adverts while important for job seekers – and so helpful for the industry as a whole – would not have brought in much money). The press directories (which were used by advertisers to decide where to advertise) don’t give any more information, so, unless the business records of this journal are discovered, it is unlikely we shall ever find out exactly how much money the journal made. That said, we can conclude that the Baker and Confectioner must have been profitable as it lasted until well into the twentieth century – as late as 1970 it can be found in the press directories as the Baker, Confectioner and Caterer. Certainly, as we explain in the next paragraph, advertising must have brought in a decent revenue, even if it is impossible to reconstruct how much.

One of the reasons it is difficult to work out how a journal made money is that it is common that when a periodical is issued in volume form (as this was) or when separate issues were bound together as a single volume by someone else (perhaps an enthusiastic reader), the advertising supplements are not included or displaced.

That’s not entirely the case with the copy of the Baker and Confectioner we have scanned on BLT19 as the supplements were bound into the volume as a kind of collective appendix after the issues. On the Metabotnik version all the pages of the volume were scanned in in the order they were bound, but where possible in the copies of individual issues we have separated out below, we have reconstructed the originals by placing the supplements after each issue. That enables us to appreciate much more easily how extensive advertising was – as long as we realise that there was almost certainly a lot more that simply doesn’t survive. What does survive, for example, is the cover for the 1 January 1897 issue. The back of that lists the advertisers against Roman numerals in the supplement. But the supplement itself, like the front covers of the later issues, was never bound in and is lost to us. As a result we cannot include it here (we could perhaps hunt for those missing pages in archives and pay for them to be scanned in, but, as we explain on the BLT19 home page, we have to balance costs against benefit and, accepting incompleteness, we don’t think the slight gain worth the time or money).

The arbitrary separation of Supplements from the main body of the periodical is particularly visible here even though traditionally supplements have often been regarded as superfluous and even irrelevant to historians and bibliographers more interested in editorial. Yet in several Supplements of the Baker and Confectioner editorial sections are woven through the adverts, creating a confusion between them: the spatial (and hence status) difference between editorial and advert is blurred, even if the formats of each remain distinct.

This sharing of paper space is a continuation of the running adverts at the foot of the main body pages that we see in this periodical and that had been a feature of many nineteenth-century periodicals, whether oriented towards the instrumentality of trade or leisure-reading. It is precisely as a case study that demonstrates the tacit violence of bibliographical attitudes that dismiss supplements that we have chosen to bring back together the supplement and the issue which the hard-copy bound volume of the periodical had separated out, even though to do so gives a very great deal of additional and rather fiddly work!

Baking, Confectionary and Periodicals

Baking was (and still is) a crowded field. There were several Victorian periodicals that addressed bakers from the 1870s onwards and their associates and the field grew around 1900. According to the 1890 Newspaper Press Directory (Mitchell, p. 39) there were just 5; in 1899 there were 7 (Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory, 1900, p. 45) and by 1912, it lists 14 (Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory, 1913, p. 47). Some cost a penny a week like the Baker and Confectioner, but others targeted a more upmarket sector of the trade like the Quarterly Trade Review (from 1894 the National Association Review) , the organ of the National Association of Master Bakers and Confectioners.

The Baker and Confectioner contrasted markedly both with the National Association Review and with the more glamorous 6d monthly British and Foreign Confectioner Baker and Restaurateur which had been launched in 1877. The fact that Baker and Confectioner puts bakery first and confectionary second shows it is aiming for readers who sold cheaper goods than the elaborate confections of the cosmopolitan British and Foreign Confectioner, Baker and Restaurateur. By 1897, the year of the Baker and Confectioner we have digitised here, the British and Foreign Confectioner, Baker and Restaurateur had even adopted gold covers to ensure no-one would confuse it with a more-workaday rival!

Because we know that there is a good deal of interest in historical baking, we have noted the names of recipes in the header notes to each periodical along with other material of interest.

What follows comprises links to entire single issues. To browse a scan of the whole volume in the order in which it was stitched together, use the Metabotnik version.

  1. Introductory matter – cover for issue number 235 (1 January 1897), plus index for the whole volume
  2. no. 235, 1 January 1897
  3. no. 236, 8 January 1897
  4. no. 237, 15 January 1897
  5. no. 238, 22 January 1897
  6. no. 239, 29 January 1897
  7. no. 240, 5 February 1897
  8. no. 241, 12 February 1897
  9. no. 242, 19 February 1897
  10. no. 243, 26 February 1897
  11. no. 244, 5 March 1897
  12. no. 245, 12 March 1897
  13. no. 246, 19 March 1897
  14. no. 247, 26 March 1897
  15. no. 248, 2 April 1897
  16. no. 249, 9 April 1897
  17. no. 250, 16 April 1897
  18. no. 251, 23 April 1897
  19. no. 252, 30 April 1897
  20. no. 253, 7 May 1897
  21. no. 254, 14 May 1897
  22. no. 255, 21 May 1897
  23. no. 256, 28 May 1897
  24. no. 257, 4 June 1897
  25. no. 258, 11 June 1897
  26. no. 259, 18 June 1897
  27. no. 260, 25 June 1897