New Criticism for an old-ish city

TO ALL SUBSCRIBERS OF OUR BLOG! Manchester Review of Books has been going since October, 2016, as a WordPress website.

WE WANT TO GO TO A PRINT EDITION, A SINGLE A3 BROADSHEET, WILL YOU HELP?

We see a continuing need for a Manchester literature platform. I wrote very briefly for New Cross Review of Books and now we have Brixton Review of Books. They are great, but they are all in London and you know the LRB, and its London-centrism, and all of that. Our editorial policy is to talk to the city of Manchester from within the city, but looking outwards, to Europe, and to the world. Do I need to explain why? The general election of December 2019 seems to be part of this Manchester Review of Books re-constitution on paper.

The Manchester Review of Books website contained no pictures of books right from the start, just writing. We wanted it to be as unspectacular as possible from the beginning, to go against the grain of the pizza-vomits of colour reproducing the same banal visual content you see all over the web. The planned single broadsheet edition will continue in this vein.

We’re not making some statement about this being ‘radical’, far from it, we just wanted to pare it right down to something basic and useable. We may have a visual element from time to time, cartoons, visual poems, but not illustrations, not infantile pictures of books you can see in two seconds via a Google hit. Just the thing itself, not the glamourised consumer sheen.

We’re producing what might be seen as a very old-fashioned broadsheet. We’re fine with that, but it will be one trying to overcome the widespread death of adult thinking. It will not be dumbed-down. It will begin very basically and develop slowly. It will contain lots of reading material for people whom we assume read a lot. If you want to call that ‘value for money’, feel free.

We are making changes though. We’re dispensing with our ‘only positive reviews, ignore the rest’ ethos which we have (largely) held until now. The vapid state of arts and culture needs a rebooted cultural criticism that isn’t afraid to speak and isn’t compromised.

Our back-of-a-fag-packet economics for moving into a print edition runs like this: On 500 copies per single-sheet issue, each issue costs 0.084 of a penny per issue. Call it a penny. We can get A5 envelopes for around a penny. Second class post is 61p. Physically then, the thing costs 63-64p to be made and delivered to you – the largest cost is Royal Mail’s charge – but of course there’s our labour and organisation. If we say a pound per issue, plus a pound into our kitty, we can start by charging five pounds for a four-issue subscription.

This means we can build, very slowly and modestly, and with a few subs upfront we can pay the print costs for the first few issues. The first print run is £42 and so we need eight new subscribers to meet that first print bill. Let’s say ten, to figure in rising costs (they are). If we get well-established, we will then offer our first ten subscribers free lifetime subs.

Sound reasonable? We think it does.

To subscribe at a rate of £5 for four issues please email The Editors at mrobgeneral@gmail.com