The Return of the TLS in the Penny Press!

Ah, the joy of returning to the mighty TLS – or rather, in this instance, of it returning to me! There was a dark interval there where, as many of you will no doubt have noticed, the TLS vanished from local newsstands here in Boston – an annoying interruption in my enjoyment of the single greatest review organ in the known world. But I took the interruption as another reminder of something I’d tried to do several dozen times in the previous year: subscribe, so that these issues would be delivered to my door and I’d no longer need to trek out in snow and ice to find some ragged copy on some distant newsstand somewhere.

A simple enough procedure, you’d think, subscribing to a periodical. It is, after all, their lifeline, the bedrock of their finances – you’d infer, therefore, that they’d make it easy and attractive to do.

In reality, I’ve long since given up on the “attractive” part. As a perk for subscribing to the New York Review of Books, for instance, I get two things: issues that reach me a week after they reach newsstands, and a little red address/appointment book like people used in the Ye Olden Times before cellphones made such things painfully obsolete. As a perk for subscribing to the New Yorker, I get issues that reach me a week after they reach newsstands, and they keep the tchotchkes to themselves. As a perk for subscribing to The New Republic, I get the issues two full weeks after they reach newsstands – I get, in other words, old issues, in exchange for paying them money for things that aren’t written yet.

But even though I’ve given up on the “attractive” part, I still rather naively expect the “easy” part. Which has been a big mistake when it comes to the TLS. Time after time, their “help center” has baffled any attempt on my part to pay them money. I think I submitted this latest subscription-attempt more as a doomed gesture of defiance than anything else.

But it worked! The 9 October issue arrived on my doorstep (on 15 October, but still – nobody’s expecting miracles at this point), and even if it’s the only issue ever to arrive there again, I gathered it to my bosom with a sigh of gratitude, and the very next day, I took it to my hole-in-the-wall lunchtime restaurant and consumed it with abashed humility of a lover when the spat is over.

I found everything right where I’d left it: the donnish sniper-fire of the Letters page (“Can Professor Featherstone be unaware of the seminal work of Prussian monographist Karl Himmelfarb?”), the choice wit of J. C.’s “NB” page, and some fantastic, brainy book reviews by great writers – in this issue, for instance, both John Kerrigan and the mighty Katherine Duncan-Jones on Shakespeare and John Ure on Waterloo, plus a wonderfully intense little piece by Jonathan Dore on John McPhee’s Coming into the Country. There were also “echoes,” which always please me to read – “echoes” in this case being reviews of books I’ve reviewed myself, as in the aforementioned Kerrigan review of James Shapiro’s The Year of Lear, or Gavin Jacobson’s review of Robert Zaretsky’s Boswell’s Enlightenment, or Jenny Williams’ review of the new version of Alfred Doblin’s The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, from the New York Review of Books, or Kate McLoughlin’s review of Hazel Huchison’s The War That Used Up Words.

In all, it was like easing into a nice hot bath after a too-long interval of desolate showers. I’ll hope for such an immersion every week, cockeyed optimist that I am.