The mirror, held up again
An Scáthán was a Celtic community magazine with a newsprint edition called the Celtic Mirror. This site keeps what is left of it readable.
What the paper said it was for
The founders put their mission in two parts. The first was news: clear, concise and objective reporting on things that mattered to the Celtic community in the United States, from politics and the arts to sport and leisure. The second was preservation, bringing Celts and people who identified with them together "under one banner".
They were strict about independence. The paper had no tie to any fraternal society or club, and its staff described their aim as delivering news from reporters, not commentators. The columnists were the exception, and the paper gave them the back pages to say so.
| Name | An Scáthán (Irish for "the mirror"), printed as the Celtic Mirror |
|---|---|
| First issue | March 1995 |
| First run ended | July 1998 |
| Relaunch | March 2003, Volume 5, Number 1 |
| Circulation | Pacific Northwest, Alaska and Western Canada, plus mail subscribers across North America |
| Readers per copy | 2.82, by the paper's own count; 49% of readers said they kept every issue |
| Restored here | 95 stories from 9 issues |
How this archive is put together
The paper's web edition lived on this domain and its subdomains between 2002 and 2008, then went dark. Most of it survived only in web archive snapshots, scattered across three hostnames and wrapped in frames built for Internet Explorer 5 at 800 by 600.
We pulled every surviving page, threw out the menus, test layouts and placeholder Latin, and rebuilt each story as a single readable page. The original wording stays. Where a story reports something that was still unfolding (a ceasefire, a film in development, a monument awaiting approval) we add a short, separately marked note on what happened next, checked against published records.
Old addresses still work. Links pointing at the former /scathan/ pages are forwarded to the restored versions.
Who runs it
Journal Exchange is an independent reading room. It is not the original publisher and is not connected to the staff who produced the paper. Articles remain the work of their authors and are credited as printed.
Questions about the paper
What does An Scáthán mean?
An Scáthán is Irish for "the mirror". The founders used it as the masthead of the online edition and printed the newsprint edition as the Celtic Mirror, because, in their words, the English name had more pickup appeal on newsstands.
When was the Celtic Mirror published?
The paper launched in March 1995, stopped publishing in July 1998 and returned with a relaunch issue dated March 2003, billed as Volume 5, Number 1. The issues restored here come from summer and autumn 1995, spring 1998 and that 2003 relaunch.
Where was the Celtic Mirror distributed?
Its circulation page listed the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada: Anchorage, Fairbanks, Whitehorse, Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Portland, San Francisco, Reno, Boise and Salt Lake City, through bookshops, coffee shops, pubs and gift shops, plus mail subscriptions across the US and Canada.
Are the archived articles edited?
Only lightly. Navigation, ads and broken markup from the old pages were stripped and obvious typing errors fixed. The wording of each story is left as printed. Everything written for this site sits in a separate, clearly marked follow-up box under each article.