Monoskop Introduces First Reference Guide to Early 20th-Cen. Avant-Garde Magazines

No longer for the specialist: Monoskop Magazine has created a reference guide to avant-garde and modernist magazines printed in the early decades of the last century. "Its main sections include a selection of issues meant to initiate the uninitiated, an index of some of the most referred journals, a collection of online collections containing hundreds more titles, and a short bibliography to a field recently emerged under the poetic banner of modern periodical studies."

Up until now, the magazines have made ear-/eyeshot mostly due to the work of The International Dada Archive affiliated with The University of Iowa Libraries and UbuWeb, among "many libraries [that] have followed suit by building open-access digital repositories."

Monoskop's new Index lists the freely accessible digitized versions of each magazine--from The Little Review to BLAST to Der Sturm (a Berlin mag of expressionist art and literature, 1910-32) to Pierre Reverdy's symbolist Nord-Sud, among many others--with links to wiki pages replete with background info for each one, and other reference websites. More on the history of the little magazine:

In their day avant-garde magazines had been the closest to medium-specific publishing. Challenging the standardized procedures of the industry they tended to equalize the importance of writing, editing, illustrations, layout, typography, printing and distribution as mutually constitutive practices. The whole could become greater than the sum of its parts. Produced by makers many of whom were skilled in techniques of printing and mechanical reproduction these works are also fine examples of engaged publishing, a practice whose concerns extend from the content of pages to their ink and fiber. They are relevant not only for historians and art collectors but also for artists, publishers and theorists working today.

We love these eyes on the half shell, from The Blind Man (New York, 1917, cover by Marcel Duchamp). And L'Art cinématographique, published in Paris in eight issues from 1926 to 1931.

Find out much more at Monoskop. At top: Poesia: rassegna internazionale 5:3-6, Special Issue on Futurism, ed. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Milan, Apr-Jun 1909.