This may be before your time, whippersnapper, but back when Philebrity was just a gleam in our eyes, The Philadelphia Independent was an oft-overlooked bible for a younger (and probably far, far better) New Philadelphia. Within its over-broad sheets, there contained multitudes: A young Lord Whimsy, a cast of regulars including Christine Smallwood, Nathaniel Friedman and Erik Bader and not least, the writings of its then-scrappy (and actually still pretty scrappy) editor Mattathias Schwartz. Well, slowly but surely, Schwartz has been uploading PDFs of entire issues of the Independent onto issuu.com. Looking back on it now, it’s striking how great everything about this paper was (and, by contrast, how much Philebrity sucks and how we should immediately poach every writer and feature the Independent ever had). Ah, youth. Sometimes people get it right the first time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 11:44 am.