I never would have thought to post that link to this group. I was turned onto it by Eli Kaufman at the Banjo Collectors' Gathering in Nashville this past year, where he did a presentation on turn of the century banjo periodicals. I have printed out the entire archived collection at Rochester (sorry, trees!), and in my reading I have been struck time and again just how funny a writer Mr. Stewart was. This was the Gilded Age (the tail end of it, anyway) and the satire content is almost Twainian at times. I wish I had a copy in front of me right now to excerpt; I will return later with a few of my favorite passages. Suffice it to say that Stewart was a ruthless critic of other manufacturers, and of the then (and now) in vogue "simple method" (i.e., tablature) of learning to play. The print run of this journal contains a wealth of useful information, including histories and retrospectives, ads and diagrams, and of course lots and lots of sheet music. The journal mostly caters to the banjo crowd, despite its title, and this banjo crowd played fingerstyle with gut strings, a la Horace Weston, Vess Ossman, Fred Van Epps, etc.
