The Press Gazette reports that Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine was going to be closed down until it was purchased by new publisher, Tim Bullamore, a sub-editor at The Times and an obituary writer for The Daily Telegraph.

He said: “As a journalist I hate to see written publications having to close and I saw an awful lot of promise there. It was being run by really great people who didn’t have a magazine publishing background. They were going to close it and it only had a small number of subscribers and little advertising. We’ve already more than exceeded our targets in advertising for the first year and subscriptions on the way up.”

Jane Austen’s Regency World remains the official magazine of the Jane Austen Centre.

Under the new ownership, the magazine will be getting a makeover:

The new-look September issue of Jane Austen’s Regency World has been changed from A4-stapled to handbook-sized and perfect bound (similar to women’s monthly Glamour) and has had a redesign reducing down the 40 different fonts used in the old magazine to just four.

The new look can be seen at the Jane Austen Centre at Bath’s website.

It’s time once again for the Tuesday Open Thread, in which we post links to items that don’t quite call for a full post, but we think our readers might find interesting nonetheless.

Actually this item probably would have merited a full post, but since Alert Janeite Ben, who sent it in, suggested it for the Open Thread, we thought we would oblige (and we have nothing else to post anyway this week): Five terrible fake Jane Austen novels. For the record, we would totally read Funk and Functionality.

What’s new in your patch of Janeiteland?

Due to a great deal of recent upheaval at AustenBlog World Headquarters, we are exceedingly remiss on announcing that Laurel Ann’s lovely Austenprose blog has been hosting a great series: 17 days of Mansfield Park Madness. Unfortunately because the Editrix sucks, you’ve missed 12 days of it, but there’s still a few left. Each day there is a giveaway of a different item related to MP. Go check it out while we attempt to pull life around us like the fraying edges of a shawl… (It’s not that bad, really; just a lot going on right now.)