Spineless Journals

If you happen to enjoy keeping a finger on the pulse of what’s new in prose and poetry, you may have noticed lately that the journal Granta, that premier literary quarterly, is conspicuously absent from the news racks.

One could say that the London-based journal is, uh, a little behind schedule. “Actually, we’re expecting the Winter ’94 issue out by late spring, early summer,” said Matt Freitson, circulation manager in the U.S.

No kidding? “Some of the pieces just weren’t ready by deadline,” Freitson explained in a recent phone conversation. “Our editorial department is very uncompromising on rewriting and making sure all pieces are polished.” Thanks to that scrupulosity, the quarterly averages 2.7 issues each year, Freitson said. And it probably didn’t help matters that the editor, Bill Buford, just left to join the New Yorker.

But don’t be surprised. Though it’s enough to make more mainstream publishers cringe, the fact is that the trains don’t always run on time in the quirky world of literary journal publishing. I recently called some journals to find out about the more unusual circumstances surrounding their trade, and discovered that struggling writers aren’t the only ones who pay their dues on the mythical Grub Street.

Not long ago, the staff of Caffeine used up the memory on their computer before they could save a crucial layout. By the time the clock struck midnight, publisher Rob Cohen was already halfway across Los Angeles, searching for someone with megabytes to spare. “I drove all over, knocking on doors, looking for a Syquest we could borrow,” he recalled, chuckling. That’s a removable hard drive that can be popped into a computer for fast, extra memory. Fortunately, a friend answered Cohen’s frantic knocking and supplied the drive, so the 2-year-old publication distributed to coffeehouses could see the light of day. “It wasn’t the first time and I’m sure it’s not the last,” he said. “Maybe one day we can afford to buy one of our own.”

Dreaming of higher circulation, some small journals find their dreams blocked by the design of their product. Constructed out of sheets folded into booklet form and stapled together, these journals lack a spine, or “perfect binding.” “Some distributors won’t even bother with a journal that doesn’t have a spine,” explained Chris Roberts, a buyer for Austin-based Fine Point Press, which distributes such journals as Kenyon Review and Shenandoah and doesn’t have a “spine only” policy. “There’s no telling how a bookstore’s going to display its journals. They might shelve them like library books and some distributors want the name visible on a spine. They want to ensure it sells in any situation.”

Agni, a journal at Boston University that I worked for in graduate school, recently tried an interesting strategy to handle the flood of manuscripts paralyzing its tiny staff. If you want us to read your work, a notice said, enclose $1 with your stuff. What? writers gasped. Charge starving artists? Blasphemy! The policy was condemned so quickly that the editors abandoned it. In the end, they were lucky to arrange for graduate students to receive tuition reimbursements in exchange for “combing the slush pile for works of genius,” they wrote in a recent issue.

Even Granta, with its bohemian attitude to deadlines and healthy 76,000 circulation, isn’t exempt from such troubles. At least Matt Freitson isn’t. “Our editorial integrity’s great, but it makes it a real pain for me to sell even a few pages of ads,” he said. “Who wants to buy an ad for April if it might not come out until June?”