The first crossword puzzle appeared December 21, 1913 in the FUN pages of The New York World, Pulitzer’s paper. It was the creation of Liverpool-born journalist, Arthur Wynne, originally called a word-cross but misprinted shortly after to its familiar form, an early victim to own imposition of anarchic plasticity onto language. With understated transatlantic modesty, Wynne claimed crosswords were as old as Pompei. Back home, old poet Housman would name these the “days when heaven was falling, / The hour when earth’s foundations fled.” The world would be at war half a year later.

When Wallace Thurman announced his engagement to Louise Thompson in 1928, after just two months of courtship, tongues wagged: Harlem’s audacious “young upstart” was to marry the typewriter of his forthcoming novel, The Blacker the Berry (1929). Alain Locke—the self-appointed “mid-wife” of America’s New Negro Renaissance, which Thurman represented—immediately wrote to tell Thompson “how much I envy any man who has you for both a wife and secretary.” Others cynically echoed Locke’s point. Reflecting on their friend’s marriage to that “very effective typist,” Langston Hughes quipped to Claude McKay in September 1928 that it “isn’t a bad combine for a literary man who doesn’t like to copy his own manuscripts.” What else could Thurman mean by the engagement, given he confessed to McKay he did “not believe in marriage for an artist of any type”? Nevertheless, the marriage did not pay such dividends; in fact, it proved costly. The intelligent, well-liked Thompson, a recent Harlem arrival who had resigned from a teaching post in the Jim Crow South and was working as an amanuensis while preparing to undertake postgraduate studies in social work, separated from him within six months. She then sued him for $50 alimony per week (more than her weekly wages), and accused him of homosexuality; after which, Locke introduced Thompson to his wealthy white benefactor Charlotte Osgood Mason, who was seeking a typist for two of her beneficiaries, Thurman’s friends Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. From exile in Utah, Thurman wrote to William Jourdan Rapp, with whom he was co-writing the play Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life (1929), that he was left struggling to prepare the manuscript for publication without a replacement typist: I went downtown in search of a typist. There are no colored stenographers about. Undaunted I found a public stenographer in one of the downtown offices. Smilingly I presented her with my manuscript. . . . With hostility she regarded me. And icily informed me that she was much too busy to take any work. Still smiling I departed, came home, packed up the manuscript, took it to the postoffice and sent it to a girlfriend of mine in Los Angeles. (Thurman, Collected Writings, 155)

Strong and Weak Ties: The Joyce Circle and the Press-Cutting Bureau In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver dated December 18, 1937, James Joyce’s secretary Paul Léon described how Finnegans Wake (1939) in its final phase required multiple accomplices to reach completion: it takes some five or six other people to check the corrections, verify the additions and read the proofs. Himself, he does the composing part quite alone and from what I hear of Mr. Joyce, he works daily to about five in the...

No tengo sino libros que leo, marco con lápiz y acaban medio desencuadernados si los frecuento demasiado. (I only own books that I read, mark with pencil, and that end up with broken spines because I read them so much.)

In February 1928, the popular magazine Estampa published an unassuming centerfold photograph of a large group of people strolling through Madrid. The jovial crowd pictured is so large that they take over the sidewalk and spill into the avenue (fig. 1). At the center of the image, cheerful female dressmakers walk with synchronized steps. Nearby pedestrians take note of the group’s energetic display for the photographer and pause to look at them. This photograph does not appear to immediately offer revelations about the advent of modernity in Madrid. In fact, the revolutionary aspects of the image might go entirely unnoticed for a viewer today. However, this centerfold encompasses a number of key social and political debates brought on by the modernization of Madrid and permits surprising insight into the visual and literary culture of Spanish modernity during the 1920s and 1930s. The centerfold shows how the flourishing—albeit understudied—popular press negotiated the modernization of Madrid and the corresponding effects of this phenomenon upon metropolitan urban dynamics. I contend that mass-produced periodicals played a central part in creating new understandings of the role of modern urban citizens in Madrid throughout this period. While there are very few examples of paintings that portray early twentieth-century Madrid and even fewer that depict its modernized areas, the city in all its forms was a constant visual and textual presence in periodicals. Magazines contained photographs and conflicting reports that ranged from praise to thoughtful critique of the city’s expansions and renovations. Together, text and images mediated the modern city’s purposes and problems for readers. The popular press alerted their audience that modernity’s objectives were debatable and compelled further reflection, inviting them to personally interpret their city’s transformations. Thus, periodicals did more than entertain; they proposed and propagated critical views of modernization to their wide readership.

Southern Vancouver Island’s 100-kilometer-long BC-14 Highway slides predominantly east to west along British Columbia coastline through traditional Coast Salish territory. Beneath the old-growth trees that are the marrow of this lush ecosystem is the small, unincorporated community of Shirley, and the Cook Kettle Press (fig.1). Though small, the press is a regional hotbed of letterpress activity. As a print shop, it provides opportunities for artists to use its space and equipment. It also acts...