James Houston
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Ninety years of Clarion magazines, online

The Publications Archive’s home page: the National Clarion Cycling Club’s winged emblem above the title, a search box and a menu of years, and the first shelf, The Clarion Cyclist, with its yellow and green covers from July 1936 onwards
The library, with The Clarion Cyclist on the top shelf.

The London Clarion’s new publications archive is now online. It has 114 of the club’s magazines, newsletters and programmes, 2,393 pages in all, from the very first issue of The Clarion Cyclist in July 1936 right up to The Clarion of May 2026. They’re all free to read as page-turning books, either on the archive’s own site or on the club’s website.

The club secretary asked me to build it. The magazines had been on Issuu, which was costing the club a lot and surrounded them with off-putting adverts. The new archive doesn’t have any adverts, and costs the club nothing to run.

Reading

Click on a cover and the issue opens as a book. You can turn the pages with a click or a swipe, zoom in on the small print, or switch to a scroll view if you’d rather read down the page. It remembers where you got to, and if you share a link, it shows the issue’s cover.

The covers are arranged on shelves, one for each series, from oldest to newest, including The Clarion Cyclist, National Clarion, Boots & Spurs and The Clarion. Some of the older scans had white bands along the edges from the scanner, so I’ve trimmed those off to make them look more like the original paper.

Search

The text of every page has been read, so you can search for words inside the magazines, not just their titles, and search for whole phrases too.

Pages 2 and 3 of The Clarion Cyclist, July 1936: two columns of a ride report through the Yorkshire Dales, a drawing of a young woman cyclist in shorts called The Badge of Good Fellowship, and the National Secretary’s report
Pages 2 and 3 of the first Clarion Cyclist, July 1936. Read it.

Behind the scenes

Adding a new issue is just a case of naming the PDF with its date, putting it in the right folder for its series and pushing it to GitHub. A few minutes later it appears on its shelf, with every page searchable. Tesseract reads the text and Pagefind handles the searching, while GitHub builds the site and Cloudflare Pages hosts it, both for free.

I like that I’ve been able to help the club, with a good way of sharing these interesting documents. Have a browse at archive.londonclarion.org.uk.

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