"The Written Word" Facts Or Pics?

bonsaial1

While reading Andy's humerous albiet upsetting story on the ABS, I noticed a few things were slogging around in the old brain pan.

1. Andy knows the differance between fruit tree grafting and bonsai asthetic grafting.

2. Andy knows that ABS is probably geared towards the part of the United States large enough to support a small magazine endeavor ( hobbiests).

3. Andy knows that the articles he wants to read are probably not going to happen.

4. and... Andy knows that his opinion probably means squat...

Now.. with all that said, what am I trying to say. While it is a fact that I have decided to get back into reef aquariums, I noticed a few similarities between the two.

Check this out; this is an idea from a recent purchse of a 50.00 aquarium book I bought to get myself up to speed with what is going on in the reef world.

"Two things will happen and they are not easily overcome;
1. The inexplicable desire to read everything possible about reefs..
2. Not having enough patience to keep from overstocking the tank and leading oneself to the inevitable "crash"."

These two lines could easily be translated to bonsai. We have a hunger to read anything and everything, no matter how bad.
And.. as we start out we have to have one of everything. Sticks in pots , mallsai, pots that will never have a tree in them, bales of wire, plastic screen by the pound. Every plant that starts to have even a hint of shape in immediatly placed into a show pot and pronounced "bonsai". Plants are placed into the ground and dug the next year and placed in pots.

Yes there are many similarities. What I find strange is how many times does one have to be told that when buying stock, look for the most interesting trunk you can find. If the line of the trunk is terrible why buy it? Why does Andy, ( knowing the differance between the two grafts), have to read about it again? He already knows the dofferance. I understand that he is talking art and asthetics which differ significantly, but i'm sure that article may be interesting to someone.

I have quite a few books by Kyosuke Gun. I can't read a word of it, yet I get more information from those books then many with words I can read. Why? Because the author is very talanted. He can do with 5 or 6 drawings, what a writer can't do with a hundred paragraphs.

I don't know about you guys and gals, but the way I read a new bonsai magazine or aquarium mag for that matter, is to open it up page by page and look at all the photo's. Once I have looked at all of those, I go back through and read the captions. When I am done with that I usually will go back and read an article that had photo's that held my attention, or peeked my curiosity.

If I look at the series of photo's and the ending tree looks like crap, why would I want to read about that? How many times have we said that the latest magazine was really crummy, while it may have had good writing the photo's sucked. For me a good magazine on bonsai would be just a magazine of start to finish trees through a ten year period and captions about each photo. That would be the best learning expierance possible. Most of the bonsai articles are just filler to get some pictures in the magazine. I say get rid of the articles about the same things over and over again and just get more quality photo's of quality bonsai.

Cheery regards, Bonsai-al

__________________
I been kidding the last seven years.
no.... really!

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RonMartin(deceased)

Publishing a magazine must be a terribly hard thing to do. Much harder than a book.
With a book you have an audience that is "on the same page " with the author. Everyone starts at page one and proceeds.
A magazine is a bit different. New people are subscribing all the time. If you have the first issue then you can start at page one. But if the magazine has been around for a while and you have just subscribed then heavens knows what page you are on.
How often does one repeat the information that might have been a previous issue. It might be important information. A new subscriber might need it.
How does one balance the needs of those old subscribers and the newer ones. Must be an impossible task.