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❖ 4 ❖ CREATING A LITERARY NETWORK April 29,1961,was Louise’s forty-fifth birthday.Jon designed and printed a card, declaring his love for “the only human I’ve ever felt really comfortable with, and couldn’t stop loving to save my life.” His one complaint was that their time together passed too quickly. “But how much worse it would be without you . . . so I dare not complain, sweetest honey darling wife.” Harmony was key, and not just for domestic bliss. The two had an enormous task awaiting them, and a less secure partnership would have cracked under the strain. Jon was eleven years older than Louise, and their ages may have worked in their favor. One did not, after all, have to be young to begin a literary magazine. Harriet Monroe was fifty-one when she founded Poetry. The Webbs were old enough to understand the value of patience. Each of them had long since learned that hard work was the basic element for survival . Success was never assured. Before the Outsider could become a reality, Jon had to make his project known to potential contributors. One way he chose to do this was via an ad in the Village Voice, which had itself been in business only since 1955. The Village Voice styled itself “the newspaper of the trendmakers,” and Jon seems to have had faith that this motto was well founded. In an August 4, 1960, response to Jon’s initial rate inquiry, Voice advertising manager and photography editor Fred W. McDarrah, already known for his book of photographs , The Beat Scene, quoted ad rates of “4.90 per column inch cash in advance.” McDarrah was taken by Webb’s inquiry, remarking, “Your post card is a gas—thanks.” He made a pitch for his own photographic contribution to the magazine. “If you use a photo for your cover or any photos inside I will be glad to supply—just about anything you need particularly New York scene.” Contact between Jon and McDarrah quickly intensified, as less than a week later, Webb received another letter from the Voice, again commenting on Jon’s visually striking correspondence. McDarrah was concerned that the Outsider’s advertisement be as cost effective and useful as possible:“Jon 54 ❖ Creating a Literary Network ❖ Edgar man, the next time you send one of those very hip post cards will you kindly put it in an envelope so it doesn’t get chewed all to hell? Anyway, I have reservations about the ad you sent and herewith enclose a different version which may be more sedate but baby it’s your bread and why waste it, unless of course you are planning a cooky magazine which it doesn’t sound.” In addition to redesigning the ad, apparently to make it less cluttered , McDarrah also offered Webb the Voice’s weekly contract rate, even though he suggested the ad run only once per month. The final third of this letter was devoted, again, to a pitch by McDarrah to have Webb consider using his photographs in the Outsider. No such deal was made, as McDarrah ’s photographs did not appear in any issue of the Outsider. The Village Voice strategy worked well. About a month after the second McDarrah letter, Jon received a letter from Jack Fine, a jazz trumpeter with gigs around New York who worked as a Village Voice factotum. The business reason for the letter was to quote further ad rates, but Fine went out of his way to tell Webb his ad was generating excitement and to marvel that Jon planned to charge only a dollar per copy for his magazine. While Jon’s general ideas for the content of his magazine were in place by mid-July 1960, he was still unsure about how to print it. He was hoping to purchase “a good second-hand 12 x 18 press” and was debating whether or not to set all of the type by hand. “If I can get printers’ rates,” he wrote Lowenfels, “may have all the prose matter linotyped and set only the poems and heads myself.” This would mean an extra four or five hours of work for him each day, on top of his own writing schedule. He had begun writing poetry, but had no luck placing it in other magazines. Jon’s plans for the Outsider’s format changed by early October. He was recruiting well-placed individuals within the literary underground to serve as advisory...

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