Comment: The Luxury of Literary Magazines
My new coworkers rock. They're the kind of folks who, in between ordering, shelving, and returning, helping customers in need and making the store run effectively, will have a conversation with you about literary journals. The magazine guy at our store does a tremendous job of stocking art and style mags, fashion rags and tabloids, and hefty quarterlies and literary journals. I ran into him in the back room the other day sorting returns and asked if there were any leftover copies of the old Paris Review (shh, it's one of the perks of being a bookseller.) He handed over a stripped cover copy of the previous edition and told me he was glad to find someone who was interested in reading the literary magazines, since he'd almost given up on it himself. The phraseology we agreed on was that we couldn't often afford to spend the limited currency of our reading time on the luxury of literary magazines, when there's so much, well, literature out there demanding our attent...