Edwardian Zines

A century ago, modernist writers such as Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound published much of their work in lively low-circulation journals, outlets whose graphic design could sometimes be as experimental as their writing. For years these magazines were hard to find, but now dozens of them have been digitized and posted at modjourn.org.

These publications' politics range from radical to reactionary, and some don't fit on the standard left/right spectrum. Several have an individualist orientation Reason readers might like. For H.L. Mencken fans, the site has most of his run as co-editor of The Smart Set. Early issues of The Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, contain such classical liberals as Moorfield Storey and Oswald Garrison Villard. And the anti-state feminist Dora Marsden edited three magazines here: The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist. Their anarcho-individualist contributors range from Benjamin Tucker to James Joyce.