the magazine
& was an amateur literary magazine that sourced its writing from /lit/ and shared it back with the same community. You could send in a submission by email, and sometime later you’d see it done up in an issue, which you and the 4chan equivalent of the neighbourhood kids would read in one big release thread. You could even buy a copy on-demand and have it shipped to your door, but mostly you’d click through spreads of PDF pages, reading and hoping to find something good, switching back to the thread to maybe drop the names of your favourites or comment on the design, hoping to refresh the page and find your own work mentioned. But whether or not anyone mentioned yours at all, you saw your work transformed and made part of something larger—something that felt buzzing and alive as the thread carried on, eventually pruned and leaving you in anticipation of the next issue, thinking what should I write next time? You’d be excited by the idea of being read by, and reading the work of, the people you’d been engaging with anonymously for years—of making something with them that wouldn’t disappear after the inevitable fall off the catalogue.
Nobody got paid for anything that appeared in &. There was no rejection or acceptance—not enough submissions, in part. There was never any explicit theme. Editing was effectively nonexistent besides the design work, meaning you’d expect your writing to make it out character-for-character, typos and all, on the page. And even the design could be haphazard, often made in a scramble of days before the release, mostly by the founding editor or sometimes by maybe two or three trusted posters organising by email, assembling scattered submissions into a 96-page document. Sometimes the monthly schedule would fall apart and you’d watch the months go by, wondering when or if there’d be another issue as your emails went unanswered (not that you were guaranteed a reply in the first place). But still, you looked forward to the idea of seeing another issue and of contributing to something that seemed—amidst the ephermera of /lit/—somehow more tangible.
& wasn’t the first magazine or collaborative project to appear on /lit/, but, like the others before it, it represented a thin slice of the board during a particular period of time. It encompassed incidentally the absurd, the sentimental, the obscene, pranks on the reader, rescued pages of diaries, poems to no-one, and so on. In being haphazard and uncurated, it gave an outlet for some of the people loosely aligned by their browsing /lit/, giving space for a lot of writing that probably would have otherwise died as neglected files on aging hard drives or in descending midnight threads—unlikely to ever be typeset or embellished or made fit for print. More than that, some of the writing that appeared in & stood out from the rest, and reading each issue—beyond the communal element and beyond the promise of having your own work read—meant a search for those highlights.
the best-of
Fourteen issues minus two photo books, 96 pages each except the slim 80 in 014: a mass of unfiltered writing across more than a thousand pages of different authors, different formats, different fonts, different designs and degress of legibility, between JPEG artefacts and occasional ampersands. And scattered throughout were pieces of writing that had been read in a blur on release day and maybe never again, but about which someone had thought this is pretty good before closing the PDF. Something like that. It seemed worthwhile (or maybe just fun) to resurface those pieces and apply some polish while furnishing them together in a single collection—fitting, as & went dark again after issue 014, that time with a greater degree of finality.
The resurfacing started in the summer of 2022 with me searching the /lit/ archive for the old release threads and tallying every positive mention of a piece of writing from the magazine. In threads on /lit/ I solicited recommendations for (and then later against) pieces to include, winnowing down the pieces not just based on calibre but also based on how they represented the sum of the magazine. Some posters re-read issues of & from the start to compile their favourites while others spit out half-remembered titles of memorable pieces, and my tally became a public list that expanded and contracted through critiques and votes for&against until it started to resemble the table of contents you passed earlier. There were also a dedicated few who contributed critiques of stories, design suggestions, possible illustrations, and mock-ups of covers. But lacking any clear idea of how I was going to bring all of that together, I decided I’d take some time to work on things alone and figure out what needed to be done, aiming to return in something like a few weeks to a month with the framework for a spartan paperback. Instead, the best-of turned into a protracted two-year+ personal project that grew and changed in fits as I killed sporadic weekends and late nights.
Curated, cheaper to print, a little less haphazard—those I can guarantee. Self-contained, cohesive, competently edited, worth reading front-to-back, worth sharing, still representative of /lit/, &, and the authors of the writing included—those I tried for. Having started this with no idea what I was doing, and in spite of my lingering doubts and the many things I’d do differently a second time, I’d like to think I’ve come far enough to do justice to the pieces of writing herein and the ethos that relates them. A hundred letter-sized and edited (&re-edited&re-edited) pages, treated with illustrations I hoped would carry the message without saying too much themselves, ordered in a way I hoped would at least imply a throughline between what are in many ways disparate works, and all of which I laid out in fragments then stuck together like a jigsaw. And while the writing in this collection isn’t perfect, some of it I cherish, and I do feel a tremendous fondness for the sum of those parts and the microcosm they came out of. I hope this collection serves as a fitting terminus for the period of time these pieces represent, and I hope those that read it enjoy it one way or another.
Or something like that.