Feb. 2013 Editorial: When You're Six Months in . . .




“You see, if you’re five miles out over the English Channel, with nothing but sea underneath you, er, there is a very great impetus to stay in the air.”

—Terry Jones, Monty Python’s Flying Circus

So, here we are, our sixth month of post-paper existence. Other than some teething pains related to the intricacies of turning a double-columned, magazine-formatted PDF into an e-reader-friendly epub, we’ve been pretty happy with the results. As one reader put it, “I love how the magazine now has color pictures.” We have the print-on-demand double-issue version available through Lulu.com, for those who want it (and there are a few of you, I’m pleased to report.) And best of all, we don’t have the expense (and, increasingly, sheer frustration) of dealing with a physical printer, or of figuring out how to warehouse new back issues.

We still have dozens of cartons of our old paper back issues, though, and we’re still offering sharp discounts on them. Most (but not all) individual issues from our first 24 volumes are available, at $5.00 per copy. Grab bags of all-different issues of our choice are available—40 issues for $20, 60 for $30, or 80 for $40, and other bulk discounts are also available. We want to move these, so, really, make us an offer. You can find our up-to-date back issue index at <bit.ly/x5KnYc>, or through the NYRSF web site <www.nyrsf.com>. These supplies won’t last forever! So, as they say, act now! Act without thinking! Bargains galore!

We’re very happy that so many of you have made the move over to Weightless Books, our online publisher. We have received two questions repeatedly, so I’d like to address them here. If you are subscribed to the magazine, you should receive an e-mail every month from Weightless as soon as the issue is published. If you haven’t, please check your spam filter. Because the notification e-mails are short and contain a long url, they often get falsely flagged as spam. Second, if you sign up for a Weightless Book account (which is, I hasten to add, free!), any book or magazine that you receive through Weightless will be available through the “My Library” link that is available under the “Navigation” menu on every page. You can also use “My Library” to download alternate formats—so if you want both the PDF and the epub or mobi, you can get them both there. Your Library never expires.

And here’s a special offer: If you were a subscriber to the paper edition of NYRSF and have not yet made the transition to Weightless Books: Sign up for a subscription now and then send an e-mail to <[email protected]> confirming this, and I will send you the first four digital issues free of charge. How can you afford not to take advantage of us this way?

Finally, an anecdote. If you’ve read through the issue, you’ve probably noticed the long quotations from Borges and from his Spanish-language critics in JeFF Stumpo’s piece “Until Someone Lose an I.” We’re grateful to occasional staffer Christine Quiñones for her assistance in double-checking the translations for accuracy and fluency; my own Spanish ability is best described as “can count to diez on a good day.” But I am a good American, which means I speak at most one language; encountering untranslated passages in critical articles always reminds me of an issue of The New York Review of Books from 2001. It contained, on a verso page, several sentences in French and, on the facing recto, a careful explanation that hydrogen and helium were the lightest of the elements. One could scarcely ask for a clearer example of Snow’s Two Cultures.

And so, until next time, buenos vale, au wiedersehen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

—Kevin J. Maroney

and the editors

A PDF or ePub copy of the NYRSF issue in which this editorial first appeared is available for purchase at Weightless Books.

A print edition of Issues 293 and 294 is available from
Lulu.com.