transition was published from Paris from 1927 to 1938. This cover art from Issue 26, 1937 is a silvery image of a Marcel Duchamp readymade, beautifully printed with tiny printing on the edge of the comb: “3 OU 4 GOUTTES DE HAUTEUR N'ONT RIEN A FAIRE AVEC LA SAUVAGERIE.”
The issues in our UW Madison Little Magazine collection were bound (as was the custom then; no longer) but the covers were kept intact. The binder’s label (The Logan Bindery, St. Paul, MN) appears in the gutter of this volume. The table of contents reveals a number of recognizable names. Chapters of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake were published in transition. So to speak.
“In the order of their appearance, the magazine’s covers included art by Pablo Picasso, Stuart Davis, Man Ray, Gretchen Powel, Kurt Schwitters, Eli Lotar, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, and Wassily Kandinsky.” (from Wikipedia)
In honor of Bloomsday, take a look at the first appearance of Ulysses in the March 1918 issue of the Little Review. The obscenity charges lodged against James Joyce’s groundbreaking work led the United States Post office to seize and burn several copies of the Little Review, foreshadowing the later legal battle over the complete novel.
Learn more about UW-Madison’s Little Magazine Collection here.
A look through the Winter 1974 issue of Tree, a little magazine rooted in the spiritual tradition of Kabbalah. Editor David Meltzer wrote of Tree: “I was trying to put in dialogue the classical kabbalistic texts w/ modernist & postmodernist poets, writers, artists, as a demonstration of continuity, not division or fracture.”
A look through the Winter 1948 issue of the Welsh Review.
Like many little magazines, the Welsh Review served both as a connector for and an expression of a particular literary community–in this case, Anglophone Welsh writers. The writers and editors of the Welsh Review had to struggle with the problem of expressing Welsh literary culture using the language of Wales’ colonizers. In his editorial for the first issue, editor Gwyn Jones defended his decision to publish the work of these writers:
“If they have lost their language they have not lost their nationality, and fiercely resent any suggestion that they have … I have been told the greater the success of the WELSH REVIEW the worse it will be for Wales … the opposite is true. Can any work be more useful to Wales, as things are, than to keep the English-speaking Welshman bound to their homeland? And can it be done better than by fostering and encouraging in what we expect to be a large following an awareness of their Welshness?”
Information and editorial quote from The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. More information about the Little Magazine Collection here.
This literary magazine was edited by leading young artists of the Harlem Renaissance, including Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Aaron Douglas created the distinctive line art that complemented the magazine’s writings.
Fire!! embraced an ethos of uncompromising Black pride and creativity, partly in response to the racist attitudes of mainstream white society, and partly in reaction to the ideals of respectability promoted by older leaders in the Black community.
A basement fire destroyed many of the original copies of this magazine shortly after its publication. The copy held by the Little Magazine Collection is therefore a rare treasure from American history.
1998 readers of Lesbian Short Fiction, or “LSF”, opened each new issue to find a host of original lesbian stories. In case readers were overwhelmed by the dizzying array of options, editors used an icon system that would help readers quickly locate a science fiction story, a gothic tale, or a work of erotica.
UW Madison’s Little Magazine Collection holds five issues of LSF.
The 20th issue of Quarter After Eight features artwork by Carrie Guss, and writing by R. J. Taylor, Maureen Seaton, and Sarah Trudgeon, among others.
From the Quarter After Eightwebsite: “Quarter After Eight is an annual literary journal devoted to the exploration of innovative writing. We celebrate work that directly challenges the conventions of language, style, voice, or idea in literary forms.”
