A few figures relating to the publication will no doubt be found of interest, showing, as they do, what a considerable enterprise the Editor entered upon when he launched his first number on the sea of public favour.
The thousand numbers now completed have endeavoured to bring their influence to bear by means of about ten thousand articles on subjects of all kinds interesting to girls. This is not counting fiction. When we come to fiction, we find that The Girl’s Own Paper has aided in the innocent amusement of its readers by the publication up to the present time of close on a hundred serial stories, and five times as many short stories and stories completed within the limits of a monthly part.
Suppose a girl, a model of perseverance, wanted to read through the whole thousand numbers aloud without skipping a word, she could not do it in much less than a year, reading for eight hours a day. She would have her reward at the end of that time, for she would have stored away in her head a collection of valuable matter which would make her a “none-such” for the rest of her life.
The illustrations have been about as many in number as the articles—excluding fiction. If a girl wanted to go through them all, giving to each one only half a minute of her time, she would have a picture-show that would last over ten days, giving to it eight hours a day.
If all the columns of matter were cut out and pasted in one long strip, the thousand numbers would stretch out as a narrow pathway over seven miles.
The figures are more startling when we come from columns to lines. Take all the lines of printed matter in the thousand numbers and extend them in one long line. Then whoever wants to run and read at the same time will have to run over a hundred and forty-five miles before she gets from the first words of Number One which were “Zara, or, My Granddaughter’s Money”—that being the title of the first story—down to the last syllable of the present number. Such is the distance the editorial eye has had to travel over. It is about thirty miles further than from London to Bristol, nearly twice as far as from London to Southampton, about three times as far as from Edinburgh to Glasgow, and a little less than three times the distance from London to Brighton.
Taking the whole circulation of The Girl’s Own Paper from the issue of the first number, we arrive at an imposing result. Suppose that instead of distributing the copies to subscribers, they had been hoarded up and made to form a tall pillar, one copy being laid flat on the top of another. And supposing a girl wished to read the topmost number—the present number, that is to say—without using a ladder, she would have to wait till she grew to be a hundred and seventy miles high.
It would be a pillar towering into the air to an inconvenient height, so it might be cut into sections, each of about the height, say, of Mont Blanc, and there would be about fifty-six of these.
If all the numbers which have been circulated since Number One were laid end to end, they would make a pathway long enough to go round the world at the Equator with a bit over. If one could only contrive to carry it over the sea, girls might in this way ramble round and round the globe treading on their own paper all the way.