ABSTRACT
Before cyberspace and desktop publishing, a group of us at Stanford University would spend days and days and days putting each issue of the journal TABLOID together using a beat-up light table, a messy waxer, impossible Letraset titles, and X-Acto knives and Scotch tape for primitive “collage” graphics. We took turns typing articles into columns on an electric typewriter and then spent hours whiting out typos by hand before taking the copy to the printer. We printed about one thousand copies, lined up at the post office to mail them to our scant list of subscribers, and gave a lot of copies away. But during the five years of the publication of TABLOID: A Review of Mass Culture and Everyday Life, from 1980 to 1985, the collective — a group of faculty and graduate students, most of them teaching and studying in literature departments, that got together regularly for brief discussions of editorial business and a great deal oflively talk-did a remarkably efficient job of digging into the motherlode of cultural issues — examining social fantasies, computer games, the use of radio talk shows to promote conservative propaganda, and the serendipitous new urban spaces of shopping malls or demolition sites. In common with other emerging groups, we felt ourselves to be engaged in a moral and political critique of late capitalism — though we did not feel the need to be solemn about it.
