Remember that great song from Sting's first solo album, "If You Love Something, Buy Two or Three"? I decided to follow the Stingster's advice on that, and I just bought my second copy of The Continental Literary Magazine.
For one thing, I wanted to see if the other Barnes & Noble store in Louisville had also gotten copies of the magazine. At first I thought that they hadn't. I scanned the titles of every magazine in the Arts section repeatedly, and was just about to see if somebody had mistakenly put it into the Current Events section (these things happen) when I noticed that on the bottom of the shelf where there were stacks of magazines almost at floor level, that one of the stacks had two clearly Non-Arts things on top of them. I picked up the offending trespassers and low and behold...
Hmmm? Oh, sure. Mr. DeMille?
Ain't it purdy? That plastic wrapping is a nice touch for two reasons: (1) to prevent damage, obviously, but what you can't see until you disrobe it is (2) this magazine has a separate opaque cover...a cover like a hardback book gets. Without the plastic wrapping, there's no way that that cover would stay on the magazine.
Who does magazine binding like this? None I've ever seen previously...and I've seen a lot of magazines. They've all come in two varieties: stapled through the middle or glued to the cover's spine (squarebound). And as you probably have already realized, this means that the separate gatherings are sewn:
Sewn binding! That used to be de rigueur in the book publishing industry--in fact, I even have a few old paperbacks with sewn binding--but nowadays it's rare to find even a hardback book ($30 bucks or so) with this level of quality.
One last thing vis-à-vis the physical qualities of this magazine: the design / layout. For instance, here are the title pages for one of the entries:
I haven't looked at The New Yorker lately, but I'll bet that they wouldn't spend two of their pages on the title and author of a piece included in their pages. And on the one hand, why should they? You could argue that it's a waste of space, that you could have fit that information into a few lines or one-fourth of a page at most, and then you'd be able to include more text pieces in your magazine. That's perfectly rational. On the other hand, what a way to bring attention to an author and to honor her writing. This kind of layout says, We respect this piece of writing. (I lean that way, in case you hadn't guessed.)
All this explains the heavy price of the magazine: $19.90. I don't normally buy magazines these days because the prices have shot up so much. In fact, last time I looked at a copy of a magazine I was interested in it was $15...and it was nowhere near The Continental in terms of quality. Or quantity.
So there's that.
And the contents? Well, I'm still working my way through it, because there are a lot of pieces in these 208 pages--24 of them, to be exact-- but I've been very pleased by what I've read so far. I started with the interview with Noam Chomsky, which was one of the reasons that I was hunting this magazine down, and I found it to be most excellent. For one thing, the interviewer starts with questions about LANGUAGE. Given his status as an expert on geopolitical realities, it's easy to forget that Noam was first a world-renowned linguist, and I liked the fact that interviewer Sándor Jászberényi started with that, then followed the trail of language into the geopolitical implications.
(Mr. Jászberényi, by the way, is the Editor-in-Chief of The Continental, and also the author of Black Dog: Stories from the Middle East and Beyond [New Europe, 2014] & The Most Beautiful Night of the Soul: More Stories from the Middle East and Beyond [New Europe Books, 2019]--both of which reside in the bowels of the Louisville Free Public Library, and both of which are on my Must Read Soon list.)
And speaking of Mr. Jászberényi, I've also read his Introduction to the magazine, which was heartfelt and honest and engaging.
And I've read "Big Brother" by Tope Folarin, Nigerian-American writer and Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Studies, which was an interesting take on something that I do not care about at all: reality tv shows in America. I consider it quite an accomplishment on Mr. Folarin's part that he wrote a piece about something in which I had less than zero interest in such a way that I stuck with it until the end. Which didn't make me have any more love for reality tv, but it did make me respect Mr. Folarin's writing.
And I'm currently reading "Indians" by Lance Henson, a Cheyenne ("Indian") poet. I'm really interested in this piece, and will be finishing it up as soon as I stop singing the praises of The Continental here. And if you're wondering, "What are pieces by a Nigerian-American and a Cheyene doing in a magazine that is Central European (especially Hungarian) centered, I can only say that this is a No Borders magazine.
Okay. So I've only put away 34 of the 208 pages in this first issue of TC...which is a meager 16%...but I'm already feeling good about my purchase. So good that, yes, I did buy a second copy of the magazine.
For one thing, I wanted to support them. Not just by buying a second copy, but also by buying one from each of the two Barnes & Noble stores in Louisville, so that both of them would record a sale. Hopefully that will encourage them to order the second issue.
For another thing, I have a son for whom it is impossible to buy good birthday presents. He reads voraciously, and I love to give him books, but he is up to his neck in books that he has already purchased and wants to read. And I no longer have a clear idea of what he already owns and what he does not. I could easily buy him something useless and cute, but I'd much rather buy him something that would surprise him a bit and perhaps even delight him. So I will be giving my second copy of The Continental to him for his birthday. And something else as well, of course, but whatever that turns out to be will pale in comparison to this loverly magazine. I'm even willing to bet that he'll be so interested in the Noam Chomsky interview that he'll peel off the plastic and read that piece tout de suite. And maybe that will lead to more.
News as it happens.
No comments:
Post a Comment