These excerpts are from an email received, I don’t recall if it was 2019, or 2021, but here it is.
Hi Kathleen, Can I introduce myself? My name is Anthony Murphy and I found your website yesterday purely by chance as I used to have a subscription to The Amateurs’ Digest and was wondering whether it was still in existence as I ceased getting it when it moved to digital publishing.
I was sorry not to continue receiving it but I prefer to have journals in hard copy. I believe increased postage costs necessitated the change over. At the time I also had a subscription to another publication – The Cactus and Succulent Journal (of the Cactus and
Succulent Society of America).The two publications are very different: The Cactus and Succulent Journal is very glossy, lots of colour, and has a lot of scientific articles. The Amateurs’ Digest was very different in that respect, but what I liked about it was that it had a very ‘down to earth’ ethos and, yes, even though it was just a physical object, i.e. a horticultural magazine (x number of stapled pages), it managed to communicate real enthusiasm and love of the plants on every page.
Marina’s presence was evident throughout. I think I sent her a couple of very short notes on cultivation and they appeared in one or two issues. I formed the impression that she was a nice person. I subscribed for a number of years and have kept all my copies (they are in very good condition). …
I think that it is a terrific idea that you want to build an archive of her material and it’s really bad luck that it was all lost. So the ‘good news’ is that I have this material. But the ‘bad news’ is that I live in the UK, otherwise I would be happy to let you borrow it. More bad news is that I don’t know if I would be able to scan them and put them into a zip file. We have a cheap printer/scanner but I’ve only got a basic knowledge of computers (but a very large phobia of them in general). Also, all of the above material is at least 8 inches high and must run to thousands of pages. So if scanning them means doing it a page at a time, that would entail a lot of hours to do so. And our scanner is on the floor …
What I could do, though, is send you small numbers of them at a time and you could return them when you have finished with them. I’d appreciate the postage refunded – sorry I don’t want to sound mean but I regularly buy books from the USA, Canada and Australia and I notice international postage is not cheap these days. If you send me your address I’ll send you the 2005 Special Edition as I have a duplicate copy that I don’t need. Very good luck with your endeavour.
Anthony
Afterword
Many thanks to Anthony for his generous offer of a loan of his back issues of The Amateurs’ Digest. I hesitate in part because they might get lost in the post between UK and Canada. However, I am managing to dredge up old print copies here and there, and I think that part of the collection may soon be complete.&nbps; I have a donation of back issues coming from the USA.
The big “hole” in the collection is digital. I need all Marina’s publications that came out only in PDF format. If you have any, dear reader, please let me know! Desperate to have them.
Gratitude also is due for Anthony’s valuable time in reviewing the situation with the trustee who hijacked Marina’s Will in British Columbia, and disposed of her business without accounting for a page or a penny. In fact, as I have found out, a BC trustee has no legal right to dispose of a business at all that forms a part of an estate. The trustee must maintain the business. Marina’s business at the time she passed away was entirely online, with 28 years of publications that could easily have been re-sold countless times using Paypal, etc., that Marina already had used for years.
However, Anthony has given me an important assessment of the trustee’s excuses to me for not accounting at all for her 28-year publishing business. As it comes from another grower, and a former subscriber of Marina’s, it means all the more. Let me share Dr. Anthony Murphy’s critique of the lame excuses of the British Columbia Public Guardian and Trustee for not accounting for Marina’s business and legacy. First of all, see my demand letter to the BC PGT, here. And here is Anthony’s response to the attitude of the trustee who ruined Marina and stole my property, including her publishing business, my being her named sole heir and executor.
Kathleen
Marina Welham’s daughter
And I don’t know anything about cactus plants.