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Our Own Attitudes and The Fate of Small Literary Journals

Of course, we sometimes pay attention to other blogs that metion NewPages, but there is a great deal more being said here that I wish librarians, English dept. folk who can bend a librarian’s ear and just readers in general would make note of and act on. Schneider, author of the blog Free Range Librarian, tackles reasons librarians cite for not subscribing to lit mags, including cost and “they’re online.” Below are excerpts – got to the site, read it, send it to the people you know who make these decisions – or print it, hand it to them in person, and say, “Let’s talk about this.”

The statue on the green: the fate of small literary journals
October 7, 2007 at 5:28 pm by K.G. Schneider

“Most literary journals run about $20 – $50 a pop per year–enough to give casual readers pause, as Stephen King recently observed, but far less than the titles that librarians are talking about when they say serials are expensive. A fairly comprehensive subscription to the Canon could be had for a couple thou a year, which is chump change against the scale of most academic serial budgets. I haven’t run the numbers, but I’m confident you could go hog wild and subscribe to everything on the newpages.com list of print literary mags and still spend less than you would for one of the top ten high-priced journals at Williams College.”

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