In the Dark

Regular readers of this blog know that I have a habit of reading the Times Literary Supplement which I buy not only for the book reviews, but also for its excellent crossword. I’ve even won the crossword competition prize a few times. You can find an assortment of posts related to the TLS here.

Recently the Times Literary Supplement underwent something of a makeover, changing the design and switching from a weekly to fortnightly publication. The first new-style issue was published on September 5th. Here is the cover:

The cover article is about the possible identity of the “Mr W.H.” to whom William Shakespeare dedicated his collection of Sonnets; see here. I may write something about that in the not too distant future, as I’ve been reading these again recently.

Anyway, my subscription definitely specifies a “weekly print edition delivered to my door”, so that has gone out the window. I wasn’t best pleased to have the terms of my subscription changed unilaterally like that. Of course I could just read the online edition, but I don’t like reading too much on a screen. I’ve never adapted to reading books on a Kindle either. And crosswords are impossible that way. The old format TLS was rather like a tabloid newspaper, which I found easy to read and handle, and of 28 pages per edition. The new format has 48 pages (which is not 2 times 28) and is rather cramped and crowded and with heavier paper to make it look there’s more to it than there is.

The look and feel they seem to have gone for is “Generic Weekend Supplement”, as you can see if you compare it with last week’s Irish Times Weekend Magazine:

The latter supplement has 52 pages instead of 48 and has more advertisements inside but is otherwise similar.

So why mention this? Well one thing is that the number of crosswords provided by the TLS per year has now reduced by half, which to me reduces the value of the subscription significantly. Moreover, the first issue of the new style supplement was published on September 5th, but didn’t arrive through my letterbox until 24th September. That’s 19 days. The deadline for entries to the crossword competition was September 15th.

Now the old-style issues used to take about 10 days to cross the Irish Sea, which I thought was bad, but 19 days is just awful. One theory of this is that the TLS launches issues with the same momentum, so that the new edition, having about twice the mass, has half the speed and therefore takes roughly twice as long to reach the subscriber. Checking the envelope, incidentally, I see that it was postmarked Bratislava. There must be a very cheap – but slow – way of sending post from the UK to Ireland via Slovakia.

Anyway, I’ve decided not to renew my subscription to the TLS, as I did with Private Eye recently. I cancelled my subscription to the Eye not because I was offended by anything in it, but because it was taking a ridiculously long time to arrive. I can still pick up copies of both publications in the local newsagent. I’m sure Paddy will keep copies of both to one side if I ask him.

Alternatively, I might switch from the TLS to the London Review of Books or some similar. Does anyone have recommendations?

This entry was posted on September 29, 2025 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Biographical, Crosswords, Literature with tags Times Literary Supplement, Shakespeare Sonnets, William Shakespeare. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.