THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

There have been many changes of format in what we call TroL over the years. When Saul Bellow and I began it, we thought of it as a tabloid for the intelligent reader. We put out twelve issues in that format, all of which we are in the process of archiving on line. Issues 13-17 represent the desire of the Toby Press to make it into a paperback book-like magazine, a format which I personally detest, for magazines are ephemera: to be read and discarded unless you happen to be, like me, a collector of such texts. Until we are properly archive, I hang on to my file copies.

After Saul’s death, I continued the magazine – it had always been paid for out of our pockets, and is now paid out of mine only – because I thought Saul would like it to go on, and Saul, despite constant letters from Philip Roth asking him why he ‘wasted his time’ putting out a magazine’, did want it to continue. The relationship between TroL and Toby was not a happy experience. Toby was, and is, a publishing house in Jerusalem, and very much a one-man band. Issues were greatly delayed; our capable editor/proofreader, Aloma Halter, left Toby; and Toby failed completely to market us at a distance.

I then took it back: only to find that our subscriptions had taken a ninety percent drop. Issue 18 was printed in Costa Rica, and 19 in the U.K., thanks to a loose association with a designer of genius, Ornan Rotem.

It was only then that I realized what was wrong without our policy.

The official name of the magazine is ‘News from the Republic of Letters’ and I had been laggard in paying attention to the word ‘News’. That idea – that we should be bringing a constant flow of new literature to our Citizens – derived from the first Republic of Letters, as edited by Pierre Bayle. It was his contention that any subscriber to the magazine could tuck it into his pocket or portmanteau and, whether in Dublin, Bologna or Warsaw, would be received as an enlightened colleague, one who brought ‘news’ and collected news from new sources.

That is why, with Issue 20 we changed our format yet again. We remain a tabloid but we have fewer pages and appear more often, making our magazine fresher and more relevant. We now will publish as we originally intended to do: whenever there is enough first-class material to fill an issue of 16 to 24 pages.

Number 20 will appear shortly, Issue 21 in January and so on. This means that writers don’t have to wait forever to see their work in print; that our comments (especially PB’s Notebook on the back page) will reflect more closely what is going on; and that our section on books (The Reader) will be far more up to date. I suspect the only subscribers who won’t like the new format are libraries; books are easier to handle.