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Reviewed by:
  • Le Petit Journal des Refusées
  • Brad Evans
Johanna Drucker , ed., Le Petit Journal des Refusées. Houston: Rice University Press, 2009. 44 pages, illustrated. $15.99 (paperback). Facsimile edition.

Between 1894 and 1903, more than two hundred little magazines appeared in the United States. Known variously as "chapbooks," "fadzines," "toy magazines," and "ephemeral bibelots," most of them did not last more than a year.1 To judge by their titles, their ephemerality seems built in, as if a part of their aesthetic makeup: Moods (1894-1895), Chips (1895-1896), The Echo (1895-1897), The Fad (1896-1897), The Fly-Leaf (1895-1896), Impressions (1900-1903), Jabs (1901-1903), A Little Spasm (1901), The Pebble (1900-1901), The Shadow (1896), Snap Shots (1901), and Whims (1896). They seem to have been in some vague way the forerunners of the more famous little magazines of the next decade, but without the latter's bluster, artistic manifestos, or oversized personalities—and also without, or so it would seem from the critical record, noteworthy or lasting contributions to art and literature. Their editors never made a name for themselves. They published very little that was remembered and nothing that has made it into the canon. They did not spawn a movement. They did not engage in the period's tumultuous social politics. They were not popular and have few recognizable ties to trends in mass culture. They were not commented upon or reviewed by the major literary monthlies, such as the Century, Harper's, or the Atlantic Monthly. They were not collected. They were largely forgotten, even by major academic chroniclers of the periodicals, who have invariably passed them over. They scored scant mention in Frank Luther Mott's magisterial history of American magazines and were dismissed outright by Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich, who wrote that they "were not very inspiring."2

And yet the numbers are quite astounding, especially when considering that in addition to the two hundred titles in the United States, there were many hundreds more worldwide. Taken together, they feel somewhat like a movement, and at the very least an international aesthetic vogue. The wave seems to have originated in the 1880s in Paris, where [End Page 229] they were first published by the cabarets of Montmartre, most notably Le Chat Noir (which published a journal of the same name). They soon spread throughout Europe. Magazines such as Aubrey Beardsley's Yellow Book and its American counterpart The Chap-Book became the movement's models, but most of them had far less serious pretentions to establishing a lasting market presence. Longevity and a large subscription base, the generally accepted ways of judging a periodical's success, are inapplicable here. More like to them was the publication fad in Japan. An article in the Dial in 1896 commented on the popularity of magazines and newspapers in Japan, where an average of nearly eight hundred such publications were being published, noting that "the most surprising thing about these statistics is the revelation they afford of the brevity of life . . . the ephemeral life."3 And similarly ephemeral magazines were being published elsewhere. Anton Chekhov published his first stories in three magazines whose titles would have sounded immediately familiar to their American counterparts: Dragonfly, Fragments, and Alarm Clock.4 The Nobel Prize-winning Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore brought out a little magazine called Sadhana from 1891 to 1895, in which he published a number of short stories.5

So the question is, what were all these publications, and why should it matter that we recover them today? It is a question that becomes all the more intriguing as the result of a handsome, full-color facsimile edition of the American movement's most peculiar volume, Le Petit Journal des Refusées (1896), which includes a delightful afterword by its editor, Johanna Drucker. What Drucker suggests, and carries a step further in a more ambitious follow-up article about the bibelot that appeared in Victorian Poetry, is that Le Petit Journal is amusingly, deftly, even uniquely (if that is possible) an exemplar of what we might call the "middlebrow modern"—that vast terrain of fine art that was neither fully avant-garde...

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