ADAM on the eve

There is no true editorship when everything is prosperous. It is the essence of a literary magazine's life to be always uncertain of tomorrow... to run the gamut of monthly printers' bills and yet to be determined never to give up the fight.

So said Miron Grindea, editor of ADAM International Review from 1936 to 1995.

I remember reading about this publication and its extraordinary contents and contributors, and I once saw a crumbling collection of half a dozen of them in a secondhand bookshop. In those days, I subscribed to Granta which, even then, before it became completely allergic to literature, was unsatisfying. I longed for a regular, modern version of ADAM, at least in its indifference to marketing*. That was before the internet. Only another 50-odd years to go then Mark!

*In one of my earliest blogs for Splinters, I reacted against some of Granta's junk mail.