This essay explores the formative but largely unacknowledged role played by women in shaping the material and intellectual cultural productions of the mimeograph revolution in mid-century New York City. I argue that women poets used their positions as editors of little magazines to claim space – material, textual, cultural, and metaphorical – in literary and social networks in which they faced gendered marginalization. I suggest that the varied success with which they were able to do so reveals the complexities of editing, the uneven nature of the influences of gender, the determining role of domestic spaces, and the significance of affective labor in relation to the mimeograph revolution.

Tim Groenland's The Art of Editing is an exciting new addition to the field of literary sociology, making a valuable contribution to a discipline which has seen a resurgence since the turn of the millennium. In his seminal early work in the field, John Sutherland traces the origins of this kind of publishing history to Robert Escarpit's Sociology of Literature (1958), which he describes as the beginning of “modern, serious work” in considering the effects of the literary marketplace on the fiction of a particular era. However, it is the first two decades of the twenty-first century that have seen the most significant growth in sociological studies of literary production, a trend that Alan Liu calls “the resurgent history of the book.” This is a “resurgence” that Liu argues has resulted in “restoring to view … vital nodes in the circuit” of literary production, including “editors, publishers, translators, booksellers,” and many others. This recent growth in scholarly interest in the production and circulation of literary texts includes other significant figures such as James F. English, Mark McGurl, John B. Thompson, Loren Glass, Paul Crosthwaite, and David D. Hall.