Anybody with access to a photocopier and a single, mysterious-sounding word—Indigent, Thrust, and Crabby are still available—can slap together a literary magazine. Some of Seattle's fleet of new magazines, like the spartan online journal Spartan, demonstrate a clear mission. Others, like The Monarch Review, take a flood-the-zone approach, leading readers to wonder if the editors reject any submissions at all.

Of all the magazines in the city, PageBoy demonstrates the most editorial control, and volume 13, which was published just before Christmas, is the sharpest volume yet. It should be supplied to everyone who even considers launching a literary magazine, to demonstrate exactly how this sort of thing is done...

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