Traditionally, literary/little magazines have been ‘communities’ of interest, encouraging ideas and conducting unencumbered conversations. Habermas's notion of the ‘public sphere’ (8) is a useful correlative here, because to embark on a history of literary magazines invokes a past that sights developments fertilised within the frame of his idea. David Carter usefully poses a central statement: ‘We might, then, describe the history of modern periodicals as a history of attempts to re-invent the public sphere but in times, “when its material conditions had definitely passed”’ (‘Magazine culture’ 71).

It is also helpful to note the connections between broader ideas of public space and the ways in which we have constructed the idea of the literary magazine. Currently, due to the advances of commodification into most areas of social life, public spaces are increasingly becoming regulated, and with that, people are being moved on who are not seen to be conducting useful ‘business’. For example, universities are no longer relatively carefree debating sites; supermarkets offer us soundtracks and advertisements in case we forget why we went there in the first place; and — of direct relevance to this discussion — the advent of book chains has mitigated against the desire to wander and ruminate in over-organised shops. Since the mid-1990s the shopping mall has been the predominant public space.

Many of the bookshops of the 1970s were community meeting places as much as they were retail outlets, but over the period 1968 to 2012, cost pressures in publishing, as they in turn impacted on bookselling, broadly replicated the inexorable move in all retailing towards the supermarket as opposed to local corner stores, leading to (with some exceptions) the relative homogenisation of cultural products through mass-marketing. Concurrently, the impact on the literary magazines during the decades after the 1960s and 1970s was profound and contradictory, in that literary magazines are, by their very nature, an expression of the local and the ephemeral. In spite of this, during the 1980s and 1990s — in Australia, at least — a ‘coffee culture’ has sprung up in most cities and towns, offering people, on a superficial level, the chance to meet and chat. Meanwhile, on the literary level, community outbreaks have occurred, firstly in the form of writers’ centres, and lately in mainstream writers’ festivals, where public conversation is encouraged. However, such festivals have only existed due to government support and the charging of entrance fees.