Though I grew up in Chicago reading the Sun-Times and the Daily News from a precociously early age (and thus claim a historical interest), I haven’t decided yet whether the fulminating about the rapidly thinning forest of daily newspapers is misguided nostalgia, crass self-interest (yes, there is also enlightened self-interest), or just a subject to fill the rapacious needs of a nonstop news cycle. Personally, I think the verbiage and ballyhoo would be better spent preserving and nurturing magazines—and I am not talking about those shopping catalogs masquerading as something more. You know which ones I mean.

Happily, there are always those quixotic sorts who keep the torch lit, illuminating ideas and stories overshadowed by the relentless yawp of the so-called mainstream media. A Public Space, out of the writers’ paradise of Brooklyn, N.Y., fits that bill nicely. The latest edition features David Shields, T.C. Boyle, and Richard Powers along with poetry by Derek Walcott, Idra Novey, Eric Pankey, Ron Padgett, Mary Jo Bang, and of course the proverbial “more.”

And for those of you who share my concern about the deforestation of little magazines, A Public Space’s web site makes mention of the demise of Triquarterly magazine, callously shuttered by its sponsor, Northwestern University, and in a stroke that exhibits why we need such institutions reprises first editor Charles Newman’s foreword to Triquarterly’s first issue in 1964:

There are two kinds of magazines—those which fascinate with nouns, and those which delight in verbs. The former are more proper: dealing modestly with time and life, they assert rather than explain; to sell things, they name things. The latter, more common, more active, tend to make a statement, ask a question, give a command. Their tenses are generally more progressive and less tangible. This is a perfect situation for dialectic, but there isn’t one. It is not at all as simple as that. This accounts for the ambiguity of the title—Tri-Quarterly. We read it as an adverb—a modified occurrence, in which action and naming are indivisible. It may tell place, sense, manner, frequency, degree, direction. Yes and no are also adverbs…

Our task is to assemble. Literary reviews provide no more viable standards than I.Q. tests or annual income. They are simply another alternative; an attempt to bind temperament and action through language. Without resorting to epilogues or manifestoes, we want to embellish those proper nouns and common verbs which have made our culture too often a vehicle for minor aspirations and mock debate. It will be a modern enterprise, perhaps embarrassingly so, in that we are justified by little save our own potential. We’re getting dressed up to celebrate the fact we’re still looking.

Right on with the “Right On.” —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 11, 2009

Accepting writing as one’s profession allows one to indulge all manner of aberrant and/or unorthodox behavior (sometimes to or with other writers). Along with the expected impecuniosities, the great unwashed associate peculiarity with affection for the written word. Now this is not a wild habit in the scheme of things, but I must confess to a passing interest in author acknowledgements and annotations. These days it is not uncommon for writers to give thanks to their publicists (I have a feeling it is common but I am not willing to do the research to substantiate that claim). In Quarrel With the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War (Harper), quintessential English author Adam Nicolson (Seize the Fire, God’s Secretaries) salutes longtime Harper publicity maven Jane Beirn, and I was reminded of how I came to be acquainted with Nicolson and his oeuvre.

I was walking on the Lawrence Ave. beach in Chicago a few summers ago (I was either in town to speak with Eduardo Galeano or to attend my high school reunion—these things get fuzzy after awhile), when my mobile phone interrupted my Lake Michigan idyll. It was Jane Beirn inquiring about my interest in speaking with Adam Nicolson. Not having any familiarity with Nicolson, I expressed my ambivalence. The next thing I remember is reading Nicolson’s Seamanship and chatting with him upon my return to Boston—both pleasurable experiences. When I say Adam is quintessentially English, I am referring to his choice of subjects, his lineage (son of Nigel Nicolson and the grandson of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West), and the fact that he lives with his family in a castle. I ask you, can you get more English then that?

I was talking with Jane Beirn recently on another matter and she mentioned Quarrel With the King. The book was published last fall to indifferent attention—which I can understand, as the book seems to have little to attract the attention of the currently embattled American public, or even that fractional part considered literate. Jane sent me a copy and, given Nicholson’s fine prose and the fact that he focused on a crucial century (1520-1650 or so of England’s history, including its bloody civil war), I discovered that there was much more to this subject than I had apprehended at first glance. And more than that, I concluded that it is a book any publisher would—and should—be proud to publish. Thanks, Jane. —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 16, 2009

As an expatriate Chicagoan living in benighted eastern Massachusetts, I can attest to the geographical affliction prevalent in these and other parts of the East Coast that are apparently blind and ignorant of the United States west of Philadelphia—this year being an exception given the importance of funny sounding places like “Ohio” and “Indiana.” Possibly the election of a president from Illinois who lives in Chicago may change that: One has already seen the gushing tributes to ur-Chicagoan Studs Terkel—even the New York Times did a featurette on adopted Chicagoan Saul Bellow’s neighborhood.

Now comes The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age (The University of Chicago Press), a wonderful and lavish book that recalls the relatively brief publication life of The Chicagoan, a magazine amazingly comparable to the New Yorker. Reportedly University of Chicago historian Neil Harris was trolling his university’s library and came across nine bound volumes of this periodical, which was published from 1926 to 1935. This well-reproduced, well-illustrated, oversized (coffee table), 400-page book contains one issue in its entirety and numerous samplings of covers, profiles, cartoons, and snippets of a section called “Talk of the Town.”

The only thing that could top this would be a Nelson Algren renaissance. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 20, 2008