Grumpy Old Bookman
Litmags live on
Michael Allen may be a champion of wired writing, but he’s pleased to discover something of a renaissance in the world of printed literary magazines
In the library of a quiet country hotel I recently found something that I had thought was extinct. That something was a literary magazine. The term ‘literary magazine’ is a loose one, but generally speaking it means a small printed booklet, published on a monthly or quarterly basis, featuring book reviews, articles about writers and about the arts generally, and – perhaps most important from a writer’s point of view – short stories. There were never very many of these magazines, and I thought that they had died out long since. But apparently not.
The title of my newly discovered magazine is Slightly Foxed. (Foxing is an antiquarian bookseller’s term for the kind of brown age spots which appear on the pages of an old book.)