New Left Review I/2, March-April 1960

NLR Editorials

Letter to Readers

we finally managed to get most of our 9,000 copies of the first issue distributed. It was something of a small miracle performed almost entirely by voluntary help during the last month or so. To say that we—and in particular Janet Hase—are grateful would be to commit the understatement of the year. Without a hundred willing hands, ready to address labels, type stencils, fold single copies and hike round bulk orders, this letter would still be typed on top of an imposing pile of copies. As it was, we managed to secure an ancient addressograph just in the nick of time—a primitive machine and brother to the typewriter which a salesman offered to buy off us for the Typewriter Museum—seriously! So the new subscribers are now all on stencils, as well as on duplicate cards, distributed “up and down the country” to keep them safe from inquisitive fingers. For the next five issues, all we have to do (in theory) is to turn the handle. But the response to our appeal for Subscriptions was better than we expected—about 1,500 new subscribers to date, and they are still coming in, and have to be filed and sorted, and we would still be grateful if . . . Need I go on? Perhaps it’s a messy and inefficient way to push out a new Review, but when people knock on the door and ask, “Is there anything to do this evening?” we suddenly get some sense of why we are doing this at all.

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