The "little" magazines have fallen on thin times. Published in Paris attics or Greenwich Village cellars, printed on butcher paper, and usually as short-lived as May flies, little magazines were the focus and the forum of the experimental '20s, awaited by literati with breathless interest for the latest chapter of James Joyce, the newest obscurity of Ezra Pound, the next outrageous typographical innovation devised by e.e. cummings.
But the experimenters ran out of experiments; the four-letter words migrated to clothback books and the little magazines were left without shock value. The surviving quarterlies,...