Is this your first time vis­it­ing The Gentleman’s Jour­nal? Vis­i­tors are referred to the Pref­ace and Mast­head–the for­mer being a col­lec­tion of explana­tory arti­cles and the lat­ter being mere whimsy; the Port­fo­lio houses the œuvre of the Edi­tor, mr Adam Mitchell Bernard Bond of Philadel­phia, Penn­syl­va­nia; the Library is replete with refer­rals to oth­ers of value and a host of resources; and the Pri­vate Col­lec­tions are fur­nished with the verse and prose to which the Edi­tor has some affinity.

Doctor Samuel John­son, LL.D. – the lit­er­ary patron of this jour­nal – reminds the more ide­al­is­tic among us that naught but a block­head writes but for money. I can­not be justly excluded from this dicta, though I receive very lit­tle if any­thing but per­sonal sat­is­fac­tion from my writing.

Granted, I find appre­ci­a­tion for my labours amongst my friends and a hand­ful of crit­ics, but no return upon my invest­ment in the art has hith­erto been forth­com­ing. This hard truth nei­ther damp­ens my spirit, nor lessens my ambi­tion. Nev­er­the­less, I am hard-​pressed to afford the lux­ury and priv­i­lege of author­ship, for – as any cre­ative per­son inti­mately knows – art demands much energy but offers few pal­lia­tive or restora­tive reliefs.

Art does not con­de­scend,
To treat with frag­ile men,
Demands it makes,
The Spirit breaks,
Our ener­gies expend.

The pur­pose of a writer is to be read, he can­not hope to sat­isfy human want if his man­u­scripts lay strewn about his desk or shoved into dusty cases for the worm of time to chew apart. He must – if he has any hope of improv­ing his art – offer them up to the judge­ment of men and then with­draw­ing observe the reac­tion – albeit indif­fer­ence – of his critics.

This pub­lic port­fo­lio serves that pur­pose, it presents my verse; my dis­sertive and expos­i­tory, argu­men­ta­tive, nar­ra­tive and anec­do­tal, satir­i­cal and whim­si­cal prose; my anno­ta­tive and com­men­ta­tive analy­ses and crit­i­cism; my more intro­spec­tive and less stylistically-​proficient obser­va­tions; and asso­ci­ated works of visual art (e.g. sketches, paint­ings, sculp­ture) that are often deriv­a­tive of my writing.

This jour­nal has thus ceased to serve the pub­lic as a forum for thought and has suc­cumbed to the dic­tates of vain ambi­tion, pro­vid­ing a means and end for my own port­fo­lio of writ­ing. It no longer embod­ies a lofty ideal, nor pre­tends to be use­ful or mer­i­to­ri­ous. It is, at first and last, a sam­ple of that which defines the per­son of mr Adam Mitchell Bernard Bond in all of his pedantry and pre­ten­sion, in all of his pride, impetu­os­ity, and pertinacity.

I pray that my read­ers, should they suf­fer me the time of day, will derive con­sid­er­able plea­sure from that which is herein pub­lisht, and ask them to extend what­ever good will they can muster and objec­tively¹ crit­i­cise or con­demn accord­ing to their conscience.

Yr. Most Hum­ble & Obt. Svt.,
Adam Mitchell Bernard Bond