The Revelator

Wel­come all you return­ing read­ers who have fol­lowed THE REVELATOR for years, whose par­ents and grand-parents did the same, you read­ers who wait impa­tiently by the mail­box for the next issue to appear and who have book­cases bowed beneath the weight of yel­lowed edi­tions you lack the heart to discard.

Wel­come also to our first-time read­ers, flick­ing through our vir­tual pages more out of curios­ity than any sense of the enor­mity of our past, the weight we your trusty edi­tors carry on our thin shoulders.

Wel­come to the jaded, degraded, and morally con­sti­pated. Wel­come to the crazy, lazy, and pre­scrip­tion­ally hazy. Wel­come to the wait­ers, satyrs, and Johnney-come-laters. Wel­come to the syco­phants, hiero­phants, and anorexic ele­phants. Wel­come to the lost hearts, tossed parts, bossed tarts, and denizens of all-night Quickie Marts.

Wel­come one and all to the first on-line edi­tion of THE REVELATOR! We trust you won’t be disappointed.

And now a few words con­cern­ing pedigree…

Both cur­rent edi­tors, Eric Schaller and Matthew Cheney, can trace their con­nec­tion to THE REVELATOR back through generations.

Eric’s great grand­mother, Alice Bell, edited THE REVELATOR for sev­eral years while she was an ex-patriot liv­ing in Italy, using it as a vehi­cle to advance a rather bohemian ver­sion of Suf­fragette fem­i­nist the­ory. A con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure, some dis­miss Alice Bell’s fem­i­nism as sim­ply a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for her hav­ing aban­doned her chil­dren to an orphan­age back in the States, but oth­ers claim her as the spir­i­tual god-mother of the Riot Grrls movement.

Matthew’s great-great-great uncle, or maybe great-great-great-great uncle — in any case, he was plenty great — Uncle Thurston Webb, after sell­ing off Cheney’s Food & Arma­ments in Need­ham, Mass­a­chu­setts, wrote book reviews for THE REVELATOR. Oddly enough, Matthew’s grand­fa­ther insisted that Uncle Thurston was illiterate.

It is with great plea­sure that we carry on our illus­tri­ous fam­ily tra­di­tions in mak­ing THE REVELATOR avail­able world-wide through the inter­net. In this issue you will dis­cover tales of mys­tery and imag­i­na­tion along­side eru­dite expe­di­tions into worlds of the unknown – not only in words, but also PICTURES! (Uncle Thurston would, we are sure, approve.) Although not a result of con­scious intent, by strange coin­ci­dence many of the items herein involve twins, some only loosely con­joined, and thus our deci­sion to call this a Spe­cial Twins issue of THE REVELATOR. The cyn­i­cal among you may con­sider this an act of des­per­a­tion, a ploy of mar­ket­ing, a cal­lous exploita­tion reveal­ing noth­ing so much as our bio­log­i­cal igno­rance — but we ask you to open your hearts and trust the truth of all we offer!

Sin­cerely,

Matthew Cheney & Eric Schaller