The "curly script" magazines (Victoria, Southern Lady, TeaTime)

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mbanu
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Thu Aug 27, 2020 8:07 pm

These are all owned by the same company now, leading to the modern family resemblance.

I've heard that Victoria Magazine was responsible in 90s America for the revival of interest in what James Norwood Pratt called, "the tea topics little old ladies of both sexes debate", a somewhat dismissive way of saying that it focused on the aesthetics of tea-service, something that Pratt and the California gourmand crowd seemed to reject in their tea-drinking of the 80s, partially (if I am reading his friend Helen Gustafson's book correctly) due to the suffocating class issues that tended to ride on the coattails of a formal tea, where any mistake in etiquette was so socially stressful that nobody wanted to participate. I'm not sure what the trick was exactly, but Victoria Magazine seemed to be able to side-step this, I think by taking the host out of the picture, beautiful teas laid out in empty rooms and gardens waiting to be discovered like Alice wandering through Wonderland. :)

I guess there must have been some internal trouble? The internet suggests that the sort of person who appreciated the aesthetics of Victoria back then was not necessarily the sort of person who could buy antique furniture, Wedgwood teapots, or French table linens, leading to an audience-advertiser mismatch. The original editor stepped down and the magazine got a redesign which included abandoning the curly script, and just as suddenly Southern Lady appeared. Then Victoria went out of business, TeaTime appeared somewhere in there(?), and Victoria was resurrected under new management with the old curly script.

I'm fascinated by this subculture because it seems like a lot of the older brick-and-mortar teashops I've visited in the U.S. depend on the sort of customer who became interested in tea through these type of magazines.
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mbanu
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Thu Aug 27, 2020 10:21 pm

TeaTime (or is it Tea Time?) is an interesting one because there's not much info on why it was started; it looks like it was originally an offshoot of Southern Lady, as the first issue in Fall of 2003 had a "Southern Lady presents" tag on the cover:

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In 2003, Pearl Dexter's Tea: A Magazine was still running, but I'm not sure if there were any other tea magazines at the time... 2003 was the last year of Victoria magazine; not sure if these are connected events or simply a coincidence.
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pedant
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Thu Aug 27, 2020 11:54 pm

i've never heard of those magazines, but where can this kind of tea culture still be found? is it at all common?

i've seen it in movies, but the closest thing i've seen in person is a teatime service at the Dushanbe Teahouse in Boulder, CO. and even that was not a very formal thing.

the queen of england comes to mind.

as does japan because the japanese seem to latch on to random western things that captivate them.
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Fri Aug 28, 2020 12:43 am

pedant wrote:
Thu Aug 27, 2020 11:54 pm
i've never heard of those magazines, but where can this kind of tea culture still be found? is it at all common?
The UK. Parts of Europe also have similar things, which are still commonplace, mostly among the older generation though. Afternoon tea is widely practiced, geographically in places switched for coffee though.
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Fri Aug 28, 2020 12:45 am

Btw. it is just script, by definition "curly".
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mbanu
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Fri Aug 28, 2020 10:16 pm

pedant wrote:
Thu Aug 27, 2020 11:54 pm
i've never heard of those magazines, but where can this kind of tea culture still be found? is it at all common?
Older hotels sometimes offer an afternoon tea. The internet suggests that in Chicago it will be at places like the Langham, Drake, and Peninsula hotels, but for a while hotel teas had a reputation for serving so-so tea in beautiful settings.

Some towns will have a dedicated tearoom of this style, usually in a converted older home, with less glamorous setting but with the tea getting more attention from the proprietor (not a guarantee of good tea, of course, but some like the odds better).

Then there are individuals who do this style of tea for themselves and their friends and family; a popular style is garden tea out in the yard. Here is a blogger who whipped up a setting for tea-breaks while doing yard work: https://twocottagesandtea.blogspot.com/ ... ember.html :)

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pedant wrote:
Thu Aug 27, 2020 11:54 pm
the japanese seem to latch on to random western things that captivate them.
This is true tea-service wise, I think because one way to get around the stress of a formal tea becoming a social class or gender role competition is to remove the cultural markers. This also works in reverse when non-Japanese become fascinated with the Japanese tea ceremony, with little knowledge of its past social class or gender connotations there, allowing them to focus on the ritual itself.
Bok wrote:
Fri Aug 28, 2020 12:45 am
Btw. it is just script, by definition "curly".
Good point! I think I went for "curly script" to clarify in the title that I meant the font rather than that these were magazines of script-documents, like movie-scripts; probably not good wording. :)
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mbanu
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Tue Sep 08, 2020 5:53 pm

Related to these, there is a book -- "Having Tea" by Catherine Calvert, Tricia Foley, and Keith Scott Morton. This was from 1987, pre-Victoria, but everyone involved eventually ended up at Victoria. It sort of shows the pressure of the early magazine, where the editorial aesthetics seem to require the host to be removed from the tea, to allow it to be a relaxing escape rather than a standard to measure up to, while the advertisers require that the host be displayed prominently. In Having Tea, people are either in paintings, daguerrotypes from the distant past, or are children; in the one photo in the book with adults from the present, most of them are motion-blurred.

Also interesting is that there was a sort of underground warren of tea-newsletters made up of Victoria readers and occasionally endorsed by the staff, such as the TeaTime Gazette or Mary Mac's TeaTimes Newsletter. These are a bit of a mystery, as it doesn't look like anyone has tried to track them down and digitize them.
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mbanu
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Mon Jan 18, 2021 12:42 pm

mbanu wrote:
Tue Sep 08, 2020 5:53 pm
Also interesting is that there was a sort of underground warren of tea-newsletters made up of Victoria readers and occasionally endorsed by the staff, such as the TeaTime Gazette or Mary Mac's TeaTimes Newsletter. These are a bit of a mystery, as it doesn't look like anyone has tried to track them down and digitize them.
In order to manage this (I suspect), Victoria magazine eventually started its own newsletter, which ran from 1996 to 2000, the "Friends of Victoria Reader to Reader". I don't know much about it, sadly.
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mbanu
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Mon Mar 15, 2021 2:25 pm

mbanu wrote:
Mon Jan 18, 2021 12:42 pm
mbanu wrote:
Tue Sep 08, 2020 5:53 pm
Also interesting is that there was a sort of underground warren of tea-newsletters made up of Victoria readers and occasionally endorsed by the staff, such as the TeaTime Gazette or Mary Mac's TeaTimes Newsletter. These are a bit of a mystery, as it doesn't look like anyone has tried to track them down and digitize them.
In order to manage this (I suspect), Victoria magazine eventually started its own newsletter, which ran from 1996 to 2000, the "Friends of Victoria Reader to Reader". I don't know much about it, sadly.
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Finding out what happened to those newsletter readers and writers is an interesting pastime as well. In a 1999 issue, a school teacher in Teaneck, New Jersey was selling a one-off tea blend contracted through Harney & Sons and using ingredients picked from her class to raise funds for the school library. She also ended up collecting over a million teabag tags so that she could demonstrate to her students what a million of something looked like, and a few years ago was trying to find a place for the collection in a museum: https://www.recordonline.com/news/20170 ... h-tea-tags

Another nice one is Grace Nikae, a classical pianist who in 1999 was happy to give piano lessons to other Victoria Reader-to-Reader readers and writers. :)



A third might be Lynn of the "My Tea Diary" blog, who wrote in the Reader-to-Reader: https://www.my-tea-diary.com/
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Victoria
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Mon Mar 15, 2021 7:38 pm

Enjoyed listening to Debussy while reading your post @mbanu. Just reading your text regarding the teacher and her teabag collection looking for a museum inspired some imaginative possibilities on my part, unfortunately (or fortunately) my imagination is much grander than what the linked article describes.
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Mon Mar 15, 2021 8:21 pm

Amazing broaching of topic, OP! 😲🤯💥💯

LOVE IT
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mbanu
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Mon Mar 22, 2021 9:11 pm

mbanu wrote:
Fri Aug 28, 2020 10:16 pm
Then there are individuals who do this style of tea for themselves and their friends and family; a popular style is garden tea out in the yard. Here is a blogger who whipped up a setting for tea-breaks while doing yard work: https://twocottagesandtea.blogspot.com/ ... ember.html :)
Apparently a focus on the aesthetics of tea in the garden is experiencing a revival under the name "cottagecore". Some folks have suggested that it is a byproduct of COVID-19 and people having nowhere else to go. :D
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