Little Magazine, World Form by Eric Bulson

Author:Eric Bulson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT007000, Literary Criticism/Books & Reading, LAN027000, Language Arts & Disciplines/Publishing
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-11-28T16:00:00+00:00

4.2 Lola Ridge’s corrections to Broom 3, no. 2 (September 1922).

Looking for traces of exile in Broom’s typos is not unlike decoding an individual’s personality through samples of handwriting, where the slightest variation in the line of a letter could reveal something unsaid and, perhaps, unsayable.46 Created by the imprint of the type bars against paper, type has its own secrets to share, but they are hidden less in the rigidity, angle, or looseness of the letter that leaves its mark on paper than in the misplacement of letters in the word (or the missing word) that appear on the page (and do not). There is not an individual personality waiting to be discovered in or behind the typo, someone who, like compositors B and E from Shakespeare’s First Folio, can be identified by their variant spellings or mistakes. The personality in these pages is the process itself, the one that involves the reproducibility of a little magazine by an anonymous someone setting and missetting “foreign” words in reverse.

Postage. The exile of Broom was organized around the paradoxical repetition of a homecoming that was intended to take place on a monthly basis. I say “intended” precisely because things never worked out so smoothly: there were always snags on both sides of the Atlantic, crossed lines, delays, and dropped communications that threatened to dismantle any hopes for serial regularity. Issues 1 and 2 arrived late in the United States for no particular reason, but 3 was one of the more egregious cases.47 After delivering four crates of Brooms to the American Express office in Rome on December 15, 1921, where they would then travel to New York via Naples on the SS Canada on January 11, 1922, Loeb awaited some form of confirmation. In a letter dated January 28, Shaw finally reported that the ship did indeed come in, but there were “no brooms on board.”48 When they were finally tracked down, minus one of the crates that had been left with the customs appraiser, it took three more weeks to get them released. The January issue, then, finally appeared in the middle of February, with number 4, the February issue, fast on its heels. When writing to American Express about a reimbursement for the damages and delay, Loeb argued that it wasn’t just about the money: “To that must be added the loss in prestige, as an advertising medium, the loss in confidence of prospective subscribers as well as the undoubted undermining of our general reputation for punctuality and reliability.”49

Two different issues in a single month: that was the problem.50 Reputation was contingent on punctuality even with such a complicated, and indeed more costly, distribution arrangement. Loeb may have dreamt about cheaper paper in the beginning, but transatlantic postage proved to be a real nightmare and not just because of the delays, which continued with the publication of the next nine issues in Italy.51 Costs to transport Broom across the Atlantic and then throughout the United States were much higher than Loeb anticipated.

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