0.13 Bohemian by design: gelett burgess and le petit journal des  (Page 5/7)

The forthcoming publication of Le Petit Journal was announced in the pages of The Lark , however, along with the requisite call for submissions. Issue #6 of The Lark contained the following advertisement:

“The Century is Coming to a Close! Hurry Up and Get Your Name in Print or You’ll be Left. There are 63,250,000 people in the United States. 50,000 have suffered amputation of both hands. For the remaining 63,200,000 writers, there are only 7000 periodicals.” The Lark began publication in San Francisco on May 1, 1895, and ended with the Epi-Lark on May 1, 1897; the publisher was William F. Doxey. See Carolyn Wells : "What a Lark!" in The Colophon , pt. 8, ed. Elmer Adler, Burton Emmet, John T. Winterich (New York, 1931).

This grisly call for participation was followed by this description:

“It will be the smallest and most extraordinary magazine in existence. It will be printed on Black Paper with Yellow ink. The margins will be very wide, the cover almost impossible. The rates for insertion of prose articles will be only five dollars a page; poetry, ten dollars a page, but no manuscript will be accepted unless accompanied by a letter of regret at not being able to find the same available from some leading magazine. No manuscripts will be refused. Terms are cast, invariably, in advance. Each article in every paper will be blue penciled, and the author’s signature underlined. Each contributor will be allowed one hundred free copies of the number in which his article appears. Subscription to the Petit Journal de Refusées will be five dollars a year, single copies, ten cents.”

The reference to “black paper” and “yellow ink” is an obvious inversion of the design of The Yellow Book, though of course, absurd, as is the sly reference to the overproduced works of fine press publications whose margins outstripped their content and whose covers were ridiculously elaborate productions with stamping, encrusted jewels, clasps, and other atrocities meant to suggest luxury. The promise for this to be the “smallest” of such publications is another wry comment on the extravagance of over-produced works.

The Lark ’s pages had not been immune to invention. Quick on the heels of the lines cited above came a piece proclaiming a new “permutational system of psychology” which depended on “interchangeable philosophical paragraphs.” Various typographic games appeared in a section titled “The Muse in the Machine,” where handwriting and type vie in a contest staged like a dialogue. Burgess also created procedural works worthy of language poets’ games, such as “A Lexicographical Romance,” a composition governed by alphabetical ordering and word choice. So precedents for the focus on literary forms and processes are already evident in The Lark . Burgess had already employed some of his many pseudonyms—Richard Redforth, Edmond Charlroy, James F. Merioneth 2 ^nd , with their own local and western Americana associations. When he joined forces with fellow artists Ernest Peixotto, Porter Garnett, and Bruce Porter in the late-night marathon production of Le Petit Journal , he had no problem inventing many others for the female authors of the accepted “submissions.”