This is a great idea and when you look at what many publishers have done with classic public domain works you almost wonder why it hasn’t happened more!
Eoin

So what I’m paying for as a consumer then is… what?

Design, layout, and some person’s opinion as to what is interesting content?

Might work; not sure what the appetite is for something that will presumably be available for free via the Web/Kindle soon enough.

-rsh

I like this idea a lot. Stories like Hapworth 16, 1924 and Hard-Boiled Sergeant by J.D. Salinger come immediately to mind. Rob, what you’d be paying for is the editorial acumen to bring cool but obscure stuff back into wide-circulation focus. For it to work, you’d have to pick stuff like that which wouldn’t be on readers’ radar screens normally.

Frank -

If I were such an editor with such acumen, such that readers are willing to pay to know what I think is cool but obscure… why do I need the rest of the magazine staff/overhead for? Why not just offer my picks to the public through a personal website?

-rsh

Good question… but there is still something great about reading lengthy fiction in hard copy, IMO. And this context is within a mag like Harper’s that has multiple other pieces of value that it brings to its readers, fiction being one it could potentially leverage in this new way we’re discussing.

This is something GUD Magazine consciously considers, as well. While we are far from having the reach of Harpers, we do consider reprints for that very reason: to help them reach a wider audience, still. In some cases, to reach a print audience where they’ve only been seen online before (or vice versa). Still, the majority of what we publish is original material. But I do go trawling the internet for stuff (especially art and comics), and (beg?) for rights to publish.

Plus, you’ve published Jeff Somers, so you get mad street cred for that!

@robhahn: you are paying to read something you haven’t read before.

Also with Harper’s there’s a guiding sensibility, often with subtle but apt juxtapositions. This keeps it interesting. When other magazines dredge up material from the past my eyes tend to wander.

hmm… interesting, thanks!

Haste yee back

That’s a really interesting idea: magazine as curated exhibit of public works. The curator approach is one of many being tried on the web, why not explore it in print? Combine it with images available under the Creative Commons “attribution only” designation and old photos/illustrations now in the public domain, and you might have something really interesting and unique. The key, obviously, is an editor who has an eye for creating a compelling package.

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I’m really surprised by how off the mark and clueless (on a PUBLISHING website) some of the the fundamentals of this post are. Whereas the Paris Review reprint and the public-domain Madoff transcript support the characterization of a project like Harper’s (and particularly its Readings section, in which both those items appeared) as primarily “curatorial,” the idea that an excerpt from a forthcoming book qualifies as “non-original” material (or somehow innovative or novel) is simply daft. Many, many, many (most, most most!) of the essays and short stories that magazines like Harper’s and The New Yorker publish have for years been culled from some work in progress (though TNY typically elides this fact to enhance the appearance of singular prestige); even when the book isn’t soon to be released (though it often is), the stories and essays are being written as part of larger undertaking, not as one-offs created specifically at the behest of a magazine. The fundamental form in which they are meant to appear is as part of a substantial and complete collection; magazines, which pay very little money, are merely good advertising, and sometimes they run the “excerpt” right before the publication of that complete object and sometimes they run it six months or a year in advance. The only consistently original material in magazines is reporting, which, even if it eventually appears collected or anthologized, would not exist but for the expenses magazines provide to make it happen. So the only way this post makes sense is if it’s taken to say, “The Harper’s Readings section is primarily curatorial.” Well, yes. IT IS EXPLICITLY PRESENTED as a reprints section, and it has always been (for as long as I can remember it!)

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