Notebook: On the Way to the Forum

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Early Bookforum covers: Winter 2000, Spring 2002, Fall 1994, inaugural issue

There’s a tension when you write about books between being outward-looking and inward-looking. With Book Post I have tried to be outward-looking—in that I wonder about the audience for books and how to grow it, how to bring books more into people’s lives, help more people feel connected to books, find in books what will nourish them. But within the world of writers and editors there is (always?) a sense of being under threat: the pressing questions among practitioners are how to support the writing life, give recognition to sophisticated experiences, acknowledge brave pioneers and communities doing challenging things, defend work likely to have a small audience. Writers look for kindred spirits, or work that will move them forward; critics look for themes that will situate criticism in intellectual history, define the discipline as making a mark. Books criticism is constantly having arguments with itself that are not, perhaps, of much interest to occasional readers, about its purpose, the state of the culture, what is dead and not dead, etc. (example). The two ways of covering books are related but sometimes divergent.  I have often thought that a magazine is like a room—the reader entering it has a sense that these people have been brought together, that the magazine’s writers are in conversation with each other and with their subjects, even though the actual social life of making magazines is pretty atomized. Who feels welcome in your room? Who is drawn to come in?