He’s using his leader to introduce the magazine to the waiting timber world – and the following is the core of his message.

"The large number of class organs," he wrote, "render it imperative for a fresh candidate to state the reason that brings it into existence. Careful inquiries lead us to entertain a confident opinion that the Timber Trades Journal will supply a want long and deeply felt by this trade and fill a vacuum in the press which, considering the vast interests involved in timber, seems unaccountable.

"It is strange that trades of which wood is the chief staple, who spend fifteen millions sterling on imports, independently of home produce, employ vast amounts of labour and, whose invested capital would be difficult to estimate, have been without any special organ to communicate and promote their interests.

"There are ten thousand persons in this country interested in trades employing wood and, as means will be adopted to bring this journal to their notice, advertisers anxious to place their announcements before those whom they most concern, will also find our columns a valuable medium for reaching them, an opportunity that has hitherto been absent."

Reprinting those words from TTJ’s launch edition, when Queen Victoria still had nearly three decades on the throne ahead of her, is an appropriate way to flag up that 2013 is TTJ’s 140th anniversary year (and we’ll be publishing the whole of that first edition as a giveaway on May 4). But, of course, an anniversary is not just a moment for celebration, but also to think about the present and the future; for a business to consider why it’s here and where it goes in the years ahead.

Interestingly, the more I mulled over the words of that first editorial, the more they struck a chord for TTJ in the here and now. Firstly I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to say this industry needs its own publication. But I do believe, like my Victorian predecessor, that it should have and justifies one. It’s a unique business, handling in its many forms a unique, often idiosyncratic natural commodity that has supply, technical, environmental and image issues that don’t apply to any other material. That, in itself, creates a role for a dedicated medium – whether on parchment, paper or online (www.ttjonline.com). And running a report in a specific timber sector publication sets it into the wider industry context, throwing up connections and business trends that make it still more relevant and useful.

As importantly, that other original rationale for the TTJ also still applies. UK timber plc and the wider international timber industry are also a very big business, by scale alone meriting its own forum, where companies can talk among themselves, and communicate and promote their unique role, activities and products to customers in the trade and the wider world.

So for TTJ’s future it clearly must not be steady as it goes. That way lie stagnation and decline. But, while developing its content, and the way it’s delivered, either via print or electronically, the core values of the TTJ will remain as they were at the outset 140 years ago: "to advance the interests of the great trade in which it circulates". That way, hopefully, my successor will be running extracts from this comment in the year 2153.