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AYAM Misrya (Egyptian Days) and Misr Al-Mahrousa (Cairo the Protected) are two magazines wholly devoted to the Egyptian print media of the 19th and 20th centuries. For those who find time- honoured paper products as charming as I, they make exciting supplementary material. Alongside rare photographs and reprints or facsimiles, they include thoroughly researched articles that place the material in context. "I inherited a collection of rare publications and documents from my father, and eventually I decided to share my treasure," explains Ahmed Kamali, founder of Ayam Misrya, which first appeared on the news- stands in 1995. His words have greater resonance when one takes into account the general attitude towards such documents -- which are neglected, re-used and sold by the kilogramme, increasingly even by school libraries. This is ironic in the light of many a strenuous efforts to keep and maintain archives, Kamali points out; give a given archive a number of years behind bars, as it were, and it will almost certainly end up on the streets; Kamali gives the example of the Lawyers Syndicate archives. The magazine sells 7,000 copies at a reduced price -- a gesture in the direction of preserving the collective memory, particularly of the 50-60 years prior to the 1952 July Revolution.
"Egypt's history is a long chain of Pharaonic, Persian, Greek, Roman, East Roman, Arab, Ottoman, French, British, royal and military links, according to Maged Farag, the force behind Misr Al-Mahrousa. Most are more or less adequately covered. The weakest link, indeed, is the pre-1952 period; some 40 years or so became taboo and you couldn't even mention them outside a specific ideological framework. Someone had to stick his neck out, break the taboo and maintain the continuity..." A visually as well as historically compelling record produced on high-quality paper and containing some of the rarest photos of the period it dealt with, the resulting, bilingual publication of 128 pages had appeared 29 times, once a month, before it was discontinued in 2003. "When I first thought of founding the magazine, I already realised reading was not among the habits of the average Egyptian -- something that was particularly the case with history, since it has a reputation for being boring. That's why I tried to present it in an attractive way; and in fact my pictorial archive came in handy. I sold 6,000 copies on my worst issue. What brought it to an end was not low sales, but the fact that the cover price did not cover the cost of production; I had also overestimated the business community, expecting them to help out through advertising."
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