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About The
Republic of Letters
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About
"The Republic
of Letters is of very ancient origin . . .
It embraces the whole world and is composed
of all nationalities, all social classes,
all ages and both sexes . . . All
languages, ancient as well as modern, are
spoken. The arts are joined to letters, and
artisans have their place in it; but its religion
is not uniform, and its manners (as in all
republics) are a mixture of good and bad.
Piety and licentiousness are both to be found . . . Praise
and honor are awarded by popular acclaim."
—M. de
Vigneul-Marville, 1699.
News from the Republic
of Letters, as its motto indicates, has
no limits, which makes it unique among magazines.
Though it enjoys support from many quarters,
It is not sponsored by any institution. From
the beginning it has been paid for by the editors.
It is based on first-class
writing by first-class writers without regard
to form, subject, length, language or time.
Its primary function is to offer writers a forum
for their writing and readers a rich diet of
texts from past and present and from any language.
Each issue consists of
texts from both new and established writers.
These vary from full-length novellas to short
texts called arias, and in the archives it prints
texts from the past, often in new translations,
that are either forgotten or unjustly neglected.
There is no limitation as to form: lives includes
biography and memoirs; plays and other forms
of fiction and non-fiction are equally acceptable;
as is poetry, though the magazine's bias is
toward prose. The rear matter includes a full
section on recent books, The Reader, and the
Editor's column, PB's Notebook.
TroL is affiliated
with two European magazines of equal distinction:
L'Atelier du roman, edited by Lakis
Proguidis, and Sud, edited by Francesco
Forlani. It is published at irregular intervals—that
is, when sufficient material of quality is available—
and can be ordered online from
tobypress.com.
The magazine was founded
as the third magazine collaboration between
Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford, whose editing
relationship of more than fifty years included
the Noble Savage, ANON, and Editors.
TRoL began publication in broadsheet format
in 1997 and in bound edition in 2003. Mr.
Bellow wrote:
"One of the more
attractive oddities of the United States is
that our minorities are so numerous, so huge.
A minority of millions is not at all unusual.
But there are in fact millions of literate
Americans in a state of separation from others
of their kind. They are, if you like, the
readers of Cheever, a crowd of them too large
to be hidden in the woods. Departments of
literature across the country have not succeeded
in alienating them from books, works old and
new. My friend Keith Botsford and I felt strongly
that if the woods were filled with readers
gone astray, among those readers there were
probably writers as well.
To learn in detail of
their existence you have only to publish a
magazine like The Republic of Letters.
Given encouragement, unknown writers, formerly
without hope, materialize. One early reader
wrote that our paper, "with its contents
so fresh, person-to-person," was "real,
non-synthetic, undistracting." Noting
that there were no ads, she asked, "Is
it possible, can it last?" and called
it "an antidote to the shrinking of the
human being in every one of us." And
toward the end of her letter our correspondent
added, "It behooves the elder generation
to come up with reminders of who we used to
be and need to be." This is what Keith
Botsford and I had hoped that our "tabloid
for literates" would be. And for two
years it has been just that. We are a pair
of utopian codgers who feel we have a duty
to literature. I hope we are not like those
humane do-gooders who, when the horse was
vanishing, still donated troughs in City Hall
Square for thirsty nags."
—The
New York Times, Writers
on Writing, 1999
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