The magazine I work at, the London Review of Books, celebrates its 25th anniversary this autumn. "A quarter of a century," as Marilyn Monroe's character, Sugar Kane, says in Some Like It Hot, "makes a girl think." You might think 25 is less of a milestone for a literary magazine than it is for a starlet: the Times Literary Supplement, after all, is 102. But longevity isn't everything: many, including some of the best and most influential periodicals, don't last that long. T S Eliot abandoned the quarterly Criterion in 1939, 17 years after the first issue (which contained "The Waste Land") appeared. The 30 issues of Ian Hamilton's Review came out over a period of less than a decade; his New Review, where both Ian McEwan and Jim Crace were picked out of the slush pile, ran for only five years before it closed in 1979. And magazines are being started all the time, though few of them seem about to become the new Criterion (not to be confused with the New Criterion, as it was for a while in 1926), or even the new New Review.
Not so long ago there was a periodical called Butterfly, a design-heavy literary/ lifestyle magazine edited by Dan Crowe; one of its gimmicks was getting novelists to review their own novels. Last Sep- tember, there appeared the first issue of Zembla (www.zemblamagazine.com), a design-heavy literary/lifestyle magazine edited by Dan Crowe; one of its gimmicks is getting novelists to review their own novels. Another is holding interviews with dead people: Henry James, Houdini, Robert Louis Stevenson and Nietzsche so far - next up, Jimi Hendrix. The magazine is named after the "distant northern land" of which the narrator of Vladimir Nabo-kov's Pale Fire may or may not be the king in exile. It comes out an eccentric five times a year, and its slogan is curiously grim: "Fun with words". Zembla has called itself "the literary magazine that people actually want to read". A pity that Vince Frost's design doesn't make it especially easy to distinguish the words.
Zembla's letters page tends to consist mostly of messages of praise from readers, with a few spam e-mails reprinted as if they were genuine correspondence (ho ho). The best letter so far is from an anonymous book publicist: "I read your lovely new magazine with interest. Particularly your interviews. I am sure I am not alone as a publicist in wishing that more of my authors were dead." But there has been little evidence of a readership seriously engaged with the magazine's content. It is unspeakably trendy: celebrity contributors to the current issue include Rachel Weisz, Larry Clark and Brian Eno; Manolo BlahnIk is a contributing editor, and his shoes are advertised, alongside Dior, Marc Jacobs, Nicole Farhi and Gucci. The big problem is that the whole thing seems so overwhelmingly reactive: too busy pursuing what is already cool to be properly innovative itself.
Zembla is published by Simon Finch, seller of rare books. He would know the proper meaning of the title of "The Real Reader's Quarterly", Slightly Foxed (www. foxedquarterly.com). As the magazine's editors, Gail Pirkis and Hazel Wood, explain in the first issue (spring 2004), the name is "an antiquarian bookseller's term for a volume whose pages time has discoloured with brown spots".
The magazine comprises a couple of dozen reviews "for adventurous readers - people who want to explore beyond the familiar territory of the national review pages and magazines". So each contributor has a thousand words in which to enthuse about one of his or her favourite books. Among the volumes recommended in the first issue are J H Prynne's collected poems; Henry Green's memoir, Pack My Bag; novels by Penelope Fitzgerald and Paula Fox; and Beatrix Potter's Tale of Mr Tod. In the second number (which tells you when the books under consideration were published, a slightly frustrating omission from the first issue), you can read about Patrick Leigh Fermor's despatches from Greece, and Karel Capek's from England; Gainsborough's letters; and the fiction of Zola.
As well as books that have "passed the test of time", Slightly Foxed aims to draw attention to "interesting new books from small presses, and to good books from larger publishers that we feel haven't received the attention they deserve" - all admirable goals, and the magazine is mostly a pleasure to read. The idea that it is meant for "adventurous" readers, however, is barefaced flattery. Sure, it has a piece on Prynne, but there is no serious engagement with the poetry: the adventurous reader is advised to "switch on the kettle before you move on. Prynne's poems ask for coffee, a dictionary and an upright posture . . . And I suggest that finally, when the complexity defeats you, you should take to the sofa with a comfortable pillow." Intrepid stuff.
The celebrity contributors to Slightly Foxed are, unlike many of those who appear in Zembla, of the kind you might expect to find in a small literary magazine: Lynne Truss rather than Bob Geldof. But it is clear that celebrity of any kind is no big deal to the Foxed editors. The Enthusiast (www.theenthusiast.co.uk) is a "non- literary literary magazine", dedicated to "plain living and high thinking", and committed to a cult of anti-celebrity. It is edited anonymously in Bangor, County Down, and is full of tricks and jokes about authorship. The "launch issue" (July 2004) calls itself "No 2", and contains "corrections and clarifications" to the apparently fictitious No 1. It announces itself on the cover, in the manner of the London Evening Standard, as incorporating the entirely notional (or so I assume) Specialist.
At the end of each piece appears the name of its author and the town where he or she lives. The opening essay is on chickens, and it's by Frank Fletcher of Worthing; T J Press of Norwich has written "What I Believe": "I believe there is a back door with a latch, by which persons may let themselves in" (that's the whole credo); the first piece of - very sound - "advice" is from Lynn Abbott of Colchester: "Marry a plumber." Gary Hilton of Lancaster has written a piece on "How to Breathe", and there's a slightly disturbing contribution from Lynda Wise of Stockton-on-Tees entitled "How to Make a Mermaid", which begins: "Take one female orang-utan, full grown. Kill." As you read the magazine, the suspicion that the alleged authors of these pieces are no more real than a mermaid grows into almost a certainty: that "almost" is testament to the editors' skill.
Real or not, there is a decidedly unmetropolitan bent to where the Enthusiast's contributors live. There are pieces by people from Romford, Leytonstone and Lewisham. The closest that anyone gets to literary London is Marshall Young of Highgate, who helped Robert Jamieson of Durham compile the "prayer calendar" ("For MUFFINS, give thanks"). The Enthusiast is marred only by its resentment - admittedly more evident in its publicity material ("This is not a press release!") than in the magazine itself. At an imaginary launch party "hosted by London's fashionable Notting Grill restaurant", guests were treated to "a suckling pig served on a bed of used Grantas"; Len Brassinghurst of Crawley said he'd "swap all 13 issues of McSweeney's, even the comics issue, for a single, knuckle-dusting sentence from the Enthusiast No 2"; and then there is a long list of people who did not attend, beginning: "Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Zadie Smith . . ." You get the feeling that the Enthusiast cares quite a lot about not caring a jot for literary London.
Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books
