Periodical Ramblings (8)

Single Author Journals

     

 















This is my 8th post about periodicals. The others are each about a single journal or magazine. This one covers a class of periodical publications - those which are devoted to an individual. There is no formal classification for them and they are difficult to find unless you are looking for a specific person. That is, they are not listed in a subject classification and a good reference librarian would be unable to direct you to a place in the stacks where you could find all the periodicals dedicated to people. She might say, "Well I am sure there must be one for Shakespeare," and she would be correct since there are dozens dedicated to him.

     Those for authors such as Shakespeare are created by scholars and scholarly societies, but there are also many that cover the lowbrow who are written about by fans and enthusiasts and by the occasional academic interested in popular culture. There are thick single author journals that have been around for years and which publish regularly on a quarterly or annual schedule. There are also thinner magazines and newsletters that come out irregularly and which can disappear quickly.  All types of individuals can have devotees and all kinds of subjects and disciplines have a representative. There is even one (at least) about a librarian: About Larkin (the journal of the Philip Larkin society). Although he may have a journal, one learns from it that that wasn't enough to prevent the Larkin family home in Coventry from being demolished to make way for "junction 6 of the Coventry inner ring road". Such is progress.

 
















 One would think that such publications would be threatened by the Internet. Surely there must be a J. K. Rowling Society and a member within it who could create a web page or magazine. Although I am also sure there are many blogs dedicated to individual authors, most of them are likely to have been created by the unlettered and, like this one, remain unread.  A refereed journal published by an 18th century society or a university press will look better on an academic resume, so it is likely that scholarly single author journals will continue to be produced in print form, or electronically by a recognized periodical publisher.
   On the other hand, the greater threat is declining library budgets. Journal subscriptions present a real budgetary problem and the only scholar on campus who is interested in a single author is likely to have a difficult time in making the case for the retention of a periodical about one person.




















Sources: 
    For a very quick sample of single author journals produced by just one university press see Penn State University Press which is the source for all the images in this post. There are more, for example: The Arthur Miller Journal; The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies; The Journal of Nietzsche Studies and the Steinbeck Review.  I mentioned recently in a post about Mark Twain, a journal about him. Penn State has one as well - The Mark Twain Annual - which is on the list before the one for Shaw: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies.
   Such journals remain very difficult to locate (that is, all of them, not just one periodical about one author). There is one very good source, although it was published 40 years ago. Still, if you can locate it you will learn about the many titles that range widely from Balzac to Zane Grey. It is: Author Newsletters and Journals:An International Bibliography of Serial Publications Concerned With the Life and Works of Individual Authors,  Margaret C. Patterson, Gale Research Company 1979. For those of you who have read this far: there is an LC Classification for this book - Authors-Periodicals-Bibliography. I am sure that if you search by such a heading, it will still be the only book to be found.
   Before that book was available to me, I had discovered many such journals on the shelves in the periodical room and wondered about how one might find more. There was no way to do so and I pointed it out in this article. It is not bad and I will stick with the title: "Other People Magazines: A Somewhat Irreverent Look at Single Author Journals", Jerry Mulcahy, Change, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Apr., 1982), pp. 48-51.  (Although I have a pdf of the article and wrote it, the publisher has the rights. If you have access to JSTOR, you can read it.)

Post Script:
   Not all journals featuring the name of an individual on the masthead are about that individual. Penn State produces The Chaucer Review, which is also about medieval studies and literary criticism and the University of Toronto Press publishes The Tocqueville Review which focuses on  "the comparative study of social change, primarily in Europe and North America, but also covering major developments in other parts of the world, in the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville’s pioneer investigations."
   Nor all such journals located where you would expect them to be. The James Joyce Quarterly is published at the University of Tulsa. As an aside to this note Tulsa is also not the place one would expect to find, "The Edmund Wilson Library representing Wilson’s interests in literature and cultural affairs, including the Nabokov-Wilson letters, and rare hand-printed editions of Anais Nin’s early works", but that is where it is. Particularly since his son taught at Western for years and still has a cubicle in the Weldon Library there. (Another aside: The Churchillian is found fairly close by in Fulton, MO.)
   Although Western University does not have a press, for years Hume Studies originated from the campus.
    Since I am not sure I have met the gender quota, I will mention that many such journals are about women. See: The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society. 
     For the rationale for "Periodical Ramblings" see here.  For samples of the journals covered see, for example: this one about Flair or this one about The Wilson Quarterly or this one about The Sewanee Review.