Blasting With The Littles

BLASTING WITH THE LITTLES / Bill Katz Over the past fifteen years or so I've been reviewing magazines for Library Journal, a lively publication which many librarians read for advice and argument. Reviewing is pleasant work, and in an average month I must see from thirty to fifty new magazines. They are of all types, but one variety is easily distinguishable. This is the little magazine. While definition can be tricky, it really is not that difficult to discover the genuine small press voice. Consider Lightworks. Combining graphic arts with comment and criticism, the editor takes pride in literaUy putting a book of matches on the cover. Under the caption "Total Art Matchbook," one reads: "Use these matches to destroy all art museums— art libraries, etc. . . .Keep last match for this matchbook." No one, I think, will have a problem distinguishing LightworL· from the new Vanity Fair. Unlike the slick commercial venture it is published for the hell of it, with a fighting interest in the avant-garde. "Lacking in megabucks," it is put together by the "young and ungreedy," as Jonathan Williams, sage of the small press movement, puts it. Many littles besides LightworL· are concerned with less-than-wellfinanced avant-garde art, and Umbrella, the energetic publication of Judith Hoffberg, has for years told readers where to find the best in mail art, as well as many other forms not likely found in the art section of Time. The ISCA Quarterly, for example, is really a folder enclosing the work of twenty-five artists. The quarterly offers subscribers original 8 ? 10 xeroxed prints, all for only seventy-five dollars a year. Xerox and other duplicating techniques have done as much to encourage the small press movement as anything. Whereas before the 1950s most littles were printed on hand presses or mimeograph machines, today both forms of production are the exception. Thanks to relatively cheap photoreproduction and the ubiquitous offset process, it doesn't take much money to start a little magazine. Len Fulton's International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, now in its eighteenth edition, lists and annotates about three thousand small magazines and presses. These range from # Magazine to ZYGA Magazine Assemblage. In between the first and last entry you wiU find tremendous diversity, genius, vision, creativity and spirit. You will also find garbage, but I leave the distressed and distressful titles to others. In the update of Charles Hoffman and Carolyn Ulrich's The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography (Princeton University Press, 1946), EUiot Anderson and Mary Kinzie assemble essays and comments about the small press. From their The Little Magazine in America (Pushcart, 1978), one might construct a kind of checklist. A genuine little has a low 244 · The Missouri Review circulation, normally no more than five hundred, although it sometimes goes up to five thousand. The editor may pay contributors little or nothing because the whole operation is on the brink of economic disaster—saved only by grants and the patronage of subscribers and friends. Few last more than a year although those with staying power often are around for a fifth or even a tenth anniversary. The long-lived littles tend to be supported, if only in part, by universities and sometimes rather well-off literary or political establishments. There are many more ways of explaining or defining a little, but the heart of the matter is the editorial attitude where, as Anderson and Kinzie say, the little puts "experiment before ease." There is often "something edgy, something peculiar and asocial" in the work of their contributors. They may in fact be intentionally abrasive, featuring writers and artists who pride themselves on being at odds with the community. Little magazines are not confined to literature and the arts. Many of them have a political or moral mission which puts less faith in writers than in ideas. Apples will save the world, therefore they go about finding writers to pick the apples in different ways. This Soviet/Madison Avenue approach doesn't entirely rule out good writing. Indeed, sometimes it encourages rough and ready scribes. Zero One, for example, describes itself as "an elitist magazine. Anarchist oriented. Ill-mannered and unapologetic...