It’s interesting that LUText, in celebrating its 800th issue, should claim some kind of lineal descent from InkyText, the highly unofficial newsletter edited and mostly written by the late Gordon Inkster until 2000. LUText’s forerunner ‘Vickytext’ may well have been named with InkyText in mind, but as anyone who clicks on the link thoughtfully provided in LUText will discover, the two publications were radically different in content and style. For one thing, InkyText was funny; for another, it was about as far as anything could be from a vehicle for central management to initiate a ‘conversation with staff’. Indeed, management did try to co-opt InkyText into its structure, at one point offering to Gordon accreditation to report on Council meetings. This he declined, in his typically courteous manner. In subtext’s review of Marion McClintock’s excellent 2011 history of the university, Shaping the Future, we described InkyText as ‘subtext’s great predecessor’(subtext 84).
Even if we’re often not funny, we’d still like to think that subtext has a more legitimate claim to ancestry and inspiration.
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AND ANOTHER THING…
If nothing else, LUText’s small mention will have at least given readers cause to delve into the archive of Gordon Inkster’s incredible body of work, which can be marvelled at here: http://www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/~rowlings/Inkytext/