Letter from Editor Keith Botsford

Summer 2008

With this issue No. 18, the magazine reverts to the format in which Mr. Bellow and I started News from the Republic of Letters in 1996 eleven years ago. We thought of it then as ‘a tabloid for literates,’ and so we hope to make it again, a tabloid being above all ephemeral and timely, something which the demands and schedules of paperback publishing have made increasingly difficult.

This issue also marks the end of our relationship with the Toby Press, to which we remain deeply grateful for its support. There, our colleague Matthew Miller and his quondam editor, Aloma Halter, did everything possible to advance our cause, but the complexities of an editorial office in Jerusalem, and printers and distribution in America, proved too difficult to overcome.

While Mr. Bellow was still alive, we collaborated on several magazines. Each of them was started for the same reason – that the needs of the cultivated reader, a diminishing band, were not being well-served. When we started the Republic of Letters that was still evident. I don’t believe we thought of ourselves as being either ‘literary’ or ‘academic’; rather, we imagined that good writing, in any form, on any subject, at any length, was something that gave us pleasure, and therefore might give pleasures to like minds. As we belonged to no coterie, had no agenda – political or other – to advance, and had open minds, we considered magazines the appropriate form in which others like us could read each other.

Magazines are not books. They have to be current, transient and varied. In our tabloid form, each issue was, prior to publication, exciting to put together: the old and the new, the established voices and the fresh. When we had enough for an issue, out it came.
That is what we propose to get back to, and we hope you will enjoy it. We have redesigned the magazine; we will continue to publish irregularly; we will come out more frequently; we will go back to printing longer texts – those that find no home in most magazines – as inserts to be taken out, pocketed and read at leisure.

What this means to current subscribers is this: all current subscriptions will be honored on the basis of two tabloid issues for each paperback.

We would be happy to have your comments. Please Contact US.

--KB

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