Cthulhu on the cover of the Revue de la BnF, the substantial journal of the French National Library. Sadly it’s not open access. The issue, #59 (October 2019), was a world-building special issue and led into a 2020 ‘year of comics’ for the Library.

What is open access and public is the Library’s shorter quarterly ‘lobby magazine’ Chroniques. Issue #87 (January-March 2020) of Chroniques was their special BD (comics) / fantasy / Tolkien issue (they had the big Oxford Tolkien show visiting, and made it even bigger).

The #87 issueof Chroniques well worth a look, even though it’s all in French. I’d recommend a translator software but, amazingly, in 2020 it’s still impossible to translate the text of a PDF in place, without uploading it to some Cloud service or doing a half-baked conversion to MS Word first. Sure, the PDF format is hard to parse. But how difficult can it be to take a 3000px snapshot of a page, OCR and translate the text on it, erase the original text, then return the translated text into the erased area? Project Naptha can do that, though only for English… so why can’t at least one desktop PDF reader software do it? On a page such as this…

Anyway, it may also interest some readers to know that the Library’s CNLJ (children’s literature dept.) produces a very long-running journal in French La Revue des livres pour enfants (Review of Books for Children). This has a two year rolling paywall, during which only free samples are available online. After that it’s open access all the way back to 1965. This back-list reveals choice items such as Nº 242: a Nicole Claveloux special-issue.