Little magazine: History and Key Facts

In the United States, a little magazine is a magazine genre consisting of "artistic work which for reasons of commercial expediency is not acceptable to the money-minded periodicals or presses", according to a 1942 study by Frederick J. Hoffman, a professor of English. While George Plimpton disagreed with the diminutive connotations of "little", the name "little magazine" is widely accepted for such magazines.

A little magazine is not necessarily a literary magazine, because while the majority of such magazines are literary in nature, containing poetry and fiction, a significant proportion of such magazines are not. Some have encompassed the full range of the arts, and others have grown from zine roots.

The traditional characteristics of a little magazine include a 5-by-8-inch (13 cm × 20 cm) format, a two-color cover, and a semi-annual or quarterly publishing schedule. Literary magazines that do not qualify as little magazines for these reasons include Oxford American and the Lindhurst Foundation's Doubletake, measuring 9 by 12 inches (23 cm × 30 cm), having complex four-color covers, and having bi-monthly publishing schedules.

"Integral to the definition of the little magazine", according to scholars Ian Morris and Joanne Diaz, is penury. A later 1978 study by the (then) editors of TriQuarterly magazine described little magazines as putting "experiment before ease, and art before comment" and noting that "[t]hey can afford to do so because they can barely afford to do anything; as a rule they do not, and cannot, expect to make money". Hoffman considered them to be avant-garde, and editor of the Kenyon Review Robie Macauley opined that such magazines "ought to be ten years ahead of general acceptance". Ezra Pound observed that the more a magazine values profits, the less it is willing to experiment with things that are not (yet) acceptable to a mainstream readership.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Little magazine by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.