An extract from HEAT 24

Though there is always the possibility of a return, this will likely be the last issue of HEAT magazine in print form.

After fourteen years of continuous publication the sheer physical intractability of the magazine, and its limited circulation, weigh heavily upon its editor and publisher, especially at a time when the electronic medium beckons, with its heavenly promises of weightlessness and ubiquity.

Not that HEAT isn’t a beautiful object. Its design qualities are among its strongest attributes. I’ve relished the tactility both of the product and the process: the choice of paper, the poring over design alternatives, the marking up of proofs, even the packaging and the way – as the mailout to subscribers begins – the colour and the feel and the scent of the book occupy the senses. I imagine it having a similar effect, in the hands of its readers. Judging by the discrepancy between the number of copies of HEAT sold, and the number of readers who claim familiarity with it, the magazine is often passed on, or left in places where visitors are likely to see it, a testament to its physical qualities and the social possibilities these embody.

But the physicality of the book is also its greatest limitation, from a publisher’s point of view. The packaging again, the warehousing, the handling of returns, and the prohibitive cost of postage or freight which largely restricts the Australian literary magazine to a domestic readership – then, finally, the excessive and potentially overwhelming nature of the object itself, because you have to print more copies than you can sell, and the copies accumulate, on shelves, in boxes, until in an act of resignation – or is it freedom? – you consign them to the bin.

The literary magazine differs from the literary review, in that its primary offering is original new writing, in fiction, poetry or creative non-fiction. Out of respect for the nature of this writing, the literary magazine tends to be bound like a book, to favour the full-page rather than the columnar layout of text, and to limit advertising, if it has any at all. It is, essentially, a magazine in book form, which is why it appears in bookshops rather than newsagents. Over the past two decades, there has been a concerted attempt, by editors, to increase the visibility of literary magazines in bookshops, and the effect has been to make the literary magazine even more book-like. With the computerisation of bookshops, the ISSN for the magazine as a whole had to be supplemented by an ISBN specific to each issue, so that the computers could recognise it as a book. The ISBN requires a title for each issue and an author, or the editor acting as the author. The distribution cycle for bookshops, with its four-month advance notice, its sales packs and media releases, and its emphasis on the celebrity author or topical theme as selling points, made it difficult for literary magazines, but it did offer to open up a new market.

That market is very small. There might be ten, maybe fifteen booksellers in Australia, who sell literary magazines. The rest probably wouldn’t recognise the genre. If they have copies, they are likely be in the fiction anthology section, spine out – which does nothing for a magazine whose appeal depends on the variety of its contents, only a small proportion of which might be fiction. I used to fret about the propensity of booksellers to put HEAT on the floor, as if it were a newspaper, or worse still, an out of date newspaper. Even now, even in the best booksellers, literary magazines are unlikely to be far from the floor. There’s something provisional and exploratory about a good literary magazine, which must make it look like it is masquerading as a book, at least from a bookseller’s point of view.

Besides, a true literary magazine is by nature uncommercial. It has poetry for a start. Long essays. Short fiction. Literary criticism. And all sorts of confusions – between poetry and prose, between fiction and non-fiction, between fiction and autobiography. Why would you? If booksellers are diffident about selling the literary magazine, it is because only a small number of readers in the country would know what it was or would want to ask for it. A substantial proportion of that small number, the most committed part, would buy on subscription, because it is cheaper and more convenient that way, so the potential market is compromised from the beginning.

But the bookshops also offered something else to literary magazines, access to a community of readers. It is this sense of community that Amazon and other online suppliers seek to emulate by telling you what other readers similar to you have bought recently. When I began HEAT I thought that the community of readers to which it appealed would also ensure its financial success. The community would grow in time, sales of the magazine would increase. HEAT’s reputation has grown, but its sales are the same now as they were for its first issue. It is a mistake to think of a community as a market. People can identify with the objects that define them as a community without having to own them. It is enough to know they exist, and to visit or handle them occasionally, to have a sense of cultural ownership. (Some would argue that it is the state’s and not the individual’s responsibility to ensure the survival of these common cultural possessions, and so it has been with HEAT, whose survival has been underwritten by funding from government and the university, and only to a very small extent by sales.)

I think I made this mistake, of confusing communal with commercial value, because as a literary critic, I was used to dealing with books whose cultural value was established, and easily assumed that their commercial viability must be too. That this was a questionable assumption should have been obvious. At the time I made the shift from teaching Australian literature to publishing it, in the mid 1990s, one of the reasons I did so was because the books I taught had gone out of print, and the authors who had written them couldn’t find publishers.

The confusion between cultural and commercial value led me to entertain extravagant fantasies in which the offices of HEAT were housed in a converted warehouse in Sydney’s inner-west, or a colonial cottage on the Parramatta campus of UWS, or in one of the wharfs overlooking the harbour, with banks of computers attended by interns and writers in residence, contributors scurrying in and out, half a dozen full-time editors deep in reading and consultation, and sun-filled meeting rooms in which international collaborations were in the planning. These were clearly fantasies because they were visions of community, and had no commercial basis to them at all.

My belief that HEAT had a commercial as well as a cultural value was so strong, that I sought to register the name with the Trade Marks Office. I was concerned that the appearance of another publication with the same or a similar name would compromise our reputation, and therefore our appeal. Our first opponent was the World Wrestling Federation, which was planning a wrestling series and accompanying publicity in Australia under the name Heat. We soon reached an understanding. Then a second opponent appeared, a multi-national magazine publisher called EMAP, which had recently begun publishing a celebrity magazine called Heat in the UK. I guess they thought they might want to publish it in Australia one day. They asked for extension after extension, and then suddenly dropped their opposition. Our HEAT mark proceeded to registration. Now we had to deal with their application, and to launch an opposition of our own. This required serious money. Once again extensions were applied for and granted. Three times we provided sworn evidence to demonstrate the significance of HEAT, the regard in which it was held, the damage to its reputation that might be caused by a gossip magazine of the same name. The heads of the Australia Council, the Literature Board and the Copyright Agency Limited filed statements on our behalf. Finally in October 2009, eight years after our trade mark application was lodged, the decisive hearing on the matter was held in Canberra. Barristers on both sides. By this time EMAP had been taken over by the German multinational Bauer, the largest magazine publisher in Europe, with a strong line in ‘yellow press’ titles. The German multinational was represented at the hearing by a senior counsel well known in Sydney literary circles, a one-time president of the Sydney branch of PEN. I couldn’t have predicted it, but here was another reminder: it doesn’t pay to be sentimental about the idea of community.

Bauer’s argument was that there could be no confusion between our HEAT and their heat because our magazine wasn’t a magazine, it was a book. You had to savour the irony of this – we had spent fourteen years perfecting HEAT as a magazine in book form in order to increase its reach as a magazine, only to be told that it wasn’t a magazine. Fortunately the Trade Marks officer didn’t agree. ‘[Bauer’s] suggestion that a “magazine” is narrowly defined by consumers to be a non-durable publication containing glossy photos and articles on celebrities conveniently ignores a significant portion of the magazine industry’, she wrote in her judgement. She had turned to the Macquarie Dictionary for her definition of a magazine: ‘noun 1. a periodical publication, usually bound and with a paper cover, containing miscellaneous articles or pieces, in prose or verse, often with illustrations.’ This was very close to the definition of HEAT we had offered in our trade mark application: ‘magazines in book form containing essays, fiction, poetry and reviews…’ Not only were we a magazine: we were more of a magazine than their heat was. From a historical point of view this was entirely just. I imagined the person in charge of ‘M’ when the Macquarie Dictionary was in the making, calling up an eighteenth-century specialist in the English department at the university there, to ask for advice on the definition of ‘magazine’. It was okay to be sentimental after all – cultural value manifests itself in unexpected ways. Bauer’s trade mark application was refused.

But in the eight years it took to argue the case for HEAT as a magazine in book form, the whole appeal of the book as a form has changed. Its appeal is now very limited compared to that offered by the electronic medium. So many of the costs disappear – printing, packaging, postage, warehousing. No returns. Cheap and immediate access to an international readership. More to the point: the electronic medium suits the literary magazine more than the printed book because it allows it to reclaim its dynamic qualities as a miscellany. The restrictions on colour disappear. The traffic across genres is enhanced by the capacity to embed sound and video files. The distinction between back issues and the current issue disappears. This was one of the worst aspects of the magazine as book, the fact that the back issues, into which one had put so much work, would lie inactive and unread after only a few months, though they were as much a part of the conception of the magazine as its present number.

The boundaries of the literary magazine, as a printed entity, also dissolve. Since it is a miscellany, there is nothing, in principle, to restrict its combinatorial powers, or to determine where it should end. Henry Fielding’s vision, in Tom Jones, of the author as an inkeeper offering a bill of fare to the feast, is not far off the mark here. Banquet? Degustation? Perhaps Madame would prefer to have only an entrée? The elements could be served from the past as well as the present, from the same author or the same genre or the same theme. They could be drawn from different publishers, and other magazines.

We’re not talking ‘online’. Online offers distribution, advertising, discussion. The literary magazine in electronic form is downloaded to a reader, read in silence, just like a book. I can’t see that much will be lost, not compared to what is to be gained. But you could make a stronger claim for the literary magazine in this form, stronger than its increased reach, and its powers of combination, and this is its ability to lead the way in the new electronic medium. We have followed long enough as second class citizens in the world of books. Because the magazine suits the new medium so well, its formal innovations should provide a guide to what might be possible for the book itself.

We’re taking a year or two off to explore the situation. We thank our sponsors, our designers, our printers and distributors, our contributors, our readers, and all who have worked on the magazine. I think we have made something that is significant in itself – and can serve as a platform for things to come.