Source: Jessica-Parker to revive “Cornhill” Magazine

Bravo has picked up the hour-long series from Parker's Pretty Matches production company and wunderkin producers Magical Elves as part of its 2009 development slate. The hour-long show has been described by co-creators Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz as a "Project Runway"-style competition series that takes on the art world. Aspiring artists compete to produce various styles of artwork (painting, sculpting, etc.), which is then judged by a panel of experts.

The hugely successful “Cornhill” magazine was a Victorian magazine and literary journal named after Cornhill Street in London. Founded by George Murray Smith in 1860, it was a literary journal with a selection of articles on diverse subjects and serialisations of new novels and was published until 1975. It was phenomenally successful, selling many more issues than anyone had thought likely.

A source close to the publishing project said Parker became interested when she learned that the “barrier to entry” in this field was “surprisingly low” given the wide variety of freeware currently available, and that production for the co-op format publication was likely to be “outsourced to India or the Ukraine.” Sources say Parker may partner with Scholastic, Yahoo or even Huffington Post on the deal.

Among the more famous authors “Cornhill” sponsored in its previous incarnation was Willkie Collins, an author known as the forerunner of the modern day suspense genre, who is a favorite of Parker and her husband, the actor Matthew Broderick. Collin’s hit book “Armadale” was originally serialised in “Cornhill.”

Sources close to Parker say she is hoping to create an online community that overcomes the limitations imposed by existing online publishing mindsets.

“What strikes Sarah about newspapers and magazines today is that they are communities that have huge, huge communities of subscribers with similar interests who are prevented by the newsprint mindset of the publishers from communicating with each other in any meaningful or useful way,” says one intimate of Parker who is familiar with the proposal.

“People want to be a part of communities. There’s a huge desire for this. But these existing online publications are unable to form lively communities that might be commercially and artistically in a myriad of way because of old-fashioned and artificial ‘top-down’ publishing barriers imposed by executives clinging to an old newsprint mindset that doesn’t exist in the online world that we now live in.”

“Cornhill” was originally launched in hopes of gaining some of the same readership enjoyed by “All the Year Round,” a similar magazine owned by Charles Dickens, and he employed as editor William Thackeray, Dickens' great literary rival at the time.

A mark of the high regard in which it was held though was its publication of “Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands” by Queen Victoria. The stories were often illustrated and it contained works from some of the foremost artists of the time including: George du Maurier, Edwin Landseer, Frederic Leighton, and John Everett Millais. Some of its subsequent editors included G. H. Lewes, Leslie Stephen, James Payn Peter Quennell and Leonard Huxley.

Important works serialised in the journal include “Framley Parsonage” by Anthony Trollope, “Wives and Daughters” by Elizabeth Gaskell, “The White Company” and “J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement” by Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Ring and the Book” by Robert Browning, “Tithonus” by Alfred Tennyson, “Washington Square” by Henry James, “Romola by George Eliot, “Far from the Madding Crowd” by Thomas Hardy, “ Unto This Last” by John Ruskin, and of course “Armadale” by Wilkie Collins.

“She’ll probably use her existing network of publishing and art world contacts to unveil some of America’s top undiscovered visual artists and writers,” said one source close to the project.

And that’s not the only new pot the 43-year-old Parker has her creative fingers in. In Feburary of 2009, as part of her "Lovely" perfume collection, Parker will launch a series of three new fragrances called "Dawn", "Endless" and "Twilight."