On 5 October the R-101, the passenger airship, was wrecked in a storm near Paris Forty-six were killed. It was near enough for considerable public interest to encourage the editor to offer him a weekly column, "What the Stars Foretell', which became one of the paper's most popular features. All the other mass-circulation papers followed suit and, in 1941, Mass Observation discovered that "nearly two-thirds of the adult population glance at or read some astrological feature more or less regularly": figures which hold true today.It was Naylor who invented the Sun-sign column. He had to find a way of writing so that each reader could feel involved, and chose to divide his essays into 12 paragraphs, one for each person born when the Sun was passing through a particular sign. This is not an important part of astrological forecasting, but is recognisable by every reader, because it depends on the day, rather than the precise time, of birth.
This made Sun-signs perfectly suited to popularisation and, by the 1950s, most columns used them. Many astrologers think that concentration on this aspect of a birth-chart has done untold damage to serious astrology.. This is a recent personals ad from the highbrow London Review of Books: "I like my women the way I like my kebab. Found by surprise after a drunken night out and covered in too much tahini.
Before too long I'll have discarded you on the pavement of life, but until then you're the perfect complement to a perfect evening Man, 32. Rarely produces winning metaphors." For seven years the LRB personals column has been producing surreal haikus of the heart like this. It began with "67-year-old disaffiliated flaneur, jacked-up on Viagra and looking for a contortionist trumpeter" and has never looked back. It has fans from Australia to the US; there are bloggers devoted to it and now an anthology of some of the best ads is planned for later this year. The personals industry, online and in print, has come a long way since The Times first allowed matchmakers to advertise lonely spinsters in 1886.
