Book-Art
Anthologies
Alternative Publishing

"Collecting" Cultural Magazines' Self-Retrospectives (2002)

Though I must own well over fifteen thousands books, I’ve not until recently collected anything in sense of trying to purchase everything within a certain category. Most of the books owned by me were obtained for a particular project—sometimes a work currently in progress, other times a project that I did in the past but about which I nonetheless maintain an active interest, and more often for one that I am planning to do in the future. In the course of my professional life I’ve accumulated substantial amounts of 1) contemporary American literature; 2) criticism of contemporary literature; 3) avant-garde literature; 4) book-art books; 5) criticism of avant-garde art and literature; 6) various editions of books by certain favorite authors (e.g., Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, John Barth); 7) books by my friends. In no case are any of these accumulations complete, and I doubt if they ever will be.

My first publication was in a university quarterly that did not pay its authors; and though writing has been my principal source of income for over three decades now, I’ve continued to contribute to such eleemosynary journals, thinking that the abundance of them is a true index of cultural opportunity in America and thus that my continuing contributions to them constitute my principal charity. (Not all their alumni are so nostalgic, needless to say.) While my library includes shelf upon shelf of such cultural journals, what I think is more significant is the collection I’ve made of the books in which such magazines select the best work to appear in their pages—what I call self-retrospectives. Examples include The American Scholar Reader (1960), Evergreen Review Reader (1968), and The Stiffest of the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader (1989). Though such books customarily appear in modest editions designed initially for the magazines’ loyal subscribers or as special issues celebrating decade(s)-long anniversaries, they ideally give its editors an opportunity to show, better than a single issue, how they want to be regarded by posterity.

Two things I like about cultural journals’ self-retrospectives as a subject for collecting are that no one else known to me is concentrating on them and that the number of them can’t be too enormous. I own perhaps a hundred fifty. One problem is that the category is so unfamiliar I customarily must explain it at least twice, even to a bookseller eager to unload his inventory. The category of cultural magazines necessarily excludes commercial magazines. While The New Yorker clearly belongs to the latter category, if only because commercial publishers have long been eager to publish collections of anything from its pages, other slick-papered periodicals are more problematic. Apologetically I’ll admit to having volumes culled from Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, and Vogue among others.

Some retrospectives appear long after the magazine has died. I have A Dial Miscellany (1963), Civil Liberties and the Arts: Selections from Twice A Year 1938-1948 (1964), Writers in Revolt: The Anvil Anthology 1933-1940 (1973), and The Smart Set: A History and Anthology (1966), all of them selected by people other than the original editors. Some of these books appear as a magazine is dying and perhaps dies once the retrospective appears, such as Between C and D (1988) and Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan’s Explorations in Communication (1960). Other self-retrospectives are paperback expansions of books initially appearing in hardback, so that Highlights of 125 Years of the Atlantic (e. 1983) adds several selections to 119 Years of the Atlantic (1977) without even mentioning the predecessor. My collection includes retrospective volumes from art magazines, such as Flash Art and Artforum, and music magazines such as Perspectives of New Music and High Fidelity. I have selections from political magazines, such as the socialist Voices of Dissent (1958), the pacifist Seeds of Liberation (1964), and the conservative Modern Age: The First Thirty-Five Years, a Selection (1988) in addition to Echoes of Revolt: The Masses 1911-1917 (1966) and New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties (1969). Some magazines publish so little in their lifetimes that publishers are able to produce retrospective books containing everything appearing in their pages, such as New Individualist Review (1981) or Monk’s Pond: Thomas Merton’s Little Magazine (1989). Since I’ve owned such books long before I regarded them as a category, I’m not sure when my collection of them began. Perhaps the first I owned is The Esquire Reader (1960), whose paperback edition I read in September 1962, according to the date after my ownership signature. In it are “Nude Croquet,” a Leslie A. Fiedler short story that introduced his first collection a few years later; and John Barth’s “The Remobilization of Jacob Horner” that became two separate chapters of his second novel The End of the Road (1958) and thus remains important for understanding the evolution of that early work. Similarly, The Antioch Review Anthology (1953) reprints Stanley Edgar Hyman’s demolition of Edmund Wilson’s criticism, which was included in the original edition of his book The Armed Vision (1948) but omitted from the most accessible 1955 paperback. A subsidiary value of such anthologies is preserving short pieces that might be unavailable elsewhere.

The first book of this kind that I remember reviewing was Neurotica for Contact magazine in 1963; the second, for Partisan Review two years later, was A New Directions Reader (1964), which collected from nearly thirty years of America’s most distinguished literary annual. I have continued to review self-retrospectives, not only because of my taste for such books but because they give reviewers a chance, far more true than a single issue, to see what a magazine is really doing. Were I to be asked to exhibit my collection (no doubt abetted by holdings from the host library), the catalogue would be an appropriate place for reprinting some of these notices (and perhaps an expansion of this general essay).

Since certain magazines have survived long enough to issue more than one retrospective, it is not surprising that I have several from Partisan Review, four from Saturday Review, two from Harper’s, a few from the Nation, two from Antioch Review, three from The New Republic. I suppose that a sensitive scholar of cultural journals could do interesting critical analyses of how a single magazine’s self-retrospective in the 1990s differs from that done in the 1950s, say, and how such differences reflect the changing ambitions of its editors. Though most of these books memorialize contemporary American magazines, I’ve collected selections from historic journals, such as The Yellow Book (British 19th century), and from foreign critical magazines such as De Stijl and Nouvelle Revue Française.

My collection doesn’t include hardback books that reissue the contents of a little magazine’s special issue, such as Partisan Review: The 50th Anniversary Edition (1984), is entirely new work (even from dead veteran contributors), or Alan Angoff’s American Writing Today: Its Independence and Vigor (1957), which draws upon a special issue of the London Times Literary Supplement done three years before. Similarly the hardbacks Cross Section (1944, 1945) and Zero Anthology (1958) look like self-retrospectives but actually are devoted entirely to new work. One book challenging this last distinction is John Hendrik Clarke’s Harlem U.S.A. (1964), which draws mostly, but not entirely, upon a single special issue of the magazine Freedomways. (I go with the majority.) I also have, but don’t include here, a volume collecting the Southern poet-critic Donald Davidson’s contributions to a single magazine.

One book of mine that could belong but doesn’t is Assembling Assembling (1978), which is a catalog done for an exhibition of an annual I co-published during the 1970s; but my book is neither a special issue nor a selection but a critical history of the journal written by myself and others. In that respect, it resembles The Dial and the Dial Collection (1959), which is also an exhibition catalog featuring a detailed history. Perhaps some of these distinctions are critically untenable, but every consequential collection must be defined as much by exclusions and inclusions. Like any true collector, I know what I’m missing, beginning with retrospectives from The National Review, an expensive volume reportedly reprinting the entire contents of the legendary San Francisco Oracle, the first of several self-anthologies from The New Republic, two collections from the conservative British magazine Salisbury Review, and Playboy’s first anthology from itself (1954). Obviously, to be true to my mandate I must have the retrospectives of cultural journals I dislike along with books of those I admire.