Lo, these many moons ago, sometime toward the end of 1992, I was starting to get bored with the sf that was being offered in the various magazines. It was dull, homogeneous stuff. Only occasionally did one find stories that were stylistically distinctive, and demonstrating some actual lively imagination. So I decided, perhaps foolishly, to publish my own magazine, which was to be called Crank!.
The first issue of Crank! appeared in September of 1993. I chose to use a 'literary magazine' format, more like a trade paperback book, with laminated covers and acid-free paper. This made a more durable though a somewhat more expensive product than the groundwood crap most magazines use. Also, I decided right from the beginning to have no filler. No editorials, letters, reviews, artwork or cartoons. I couldn't run as many pages as a commercial magazine, so I used every page for fiction.
I published six more issues in the next three years first working from an apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, then from our ('our' being myself and my then-wife Terra) house in the same town. A photo of my messy office in the 1783 Adams-Magoun house appears on the hardcover jacket of the anthology.
It was fun and exciting, and a lot of work and a major financial drain. I did essentially all the work myself, a staff of one. This was a mistake, but I'm bad at managing and delegating work. I got to publish a lot of good stuff by writers like David Bunch, R.A. Lafferty, Gene Wolfe, Carter Scholz, Jonathan Lethem, Eliot Fintushel, Ursula Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler, and a lot of others, but as time went on the problem of diminishing returns began to set in: the rewards were being overwhelmed by the difficulties, and I went through some radical personal changes at the same time.
In 1996, I got divorced, we sold our house, quit my crummy day job (newspaper layout for a legal newspaper managed by lunatics), and I moved to New York to try to break into book publishing. I took a job at Tor Books, which meant having no money. It was two years before I could publish another issue of Crank!, and that issue only appeared because I needed to publish the last installment of James Blaylock's novel The Magic Spectacles. Which I believe is still the only U.S. publication of it.
Funding for the last issue of Crank! came from Tor's publication of the anthology, The Best of Crank!. The book has many (but not all) of the best stories from the magazine, got a boatload of great reviews (of course), and can be ordered in paperback from Amazon (of course).
I'm no longer selling individual copies of Crank! back issues from my web site, for various reasons. However, copies of most of the issues are still available, and can be ordered from Small Beer Press. They've got the whole order-and-fulfillment thing down. However, if you are a dealer interested in bulk purchases of remainders, please contact me.