Granta past & present

Before Bill Buford relaunched Granta as the ‘paperback magazine’ which attracted Penguin’s backing within seven issues, it was a student-run publication at Cambridge University. The above is a slideshow of the cover art the magazine enjoyed during that period.

Ted Hodgkinson has been preparing the online archive of the magazine from 1979 onwards. Here he looks back over a sea of permission letters, from the vantage point of the completed collection of Granta in electronic form.

The Online Archive has grown backwards as Granta continues to grow forwards. It reaches back to the very first issue, ‘New American Writing’, every issue given new electrified life by the digitization process.

The word ‘consent’ comes from the Latin consentir which means ‘to feel together, agree, accord, harmonize’, though sometimes I struggled to keep this in mind when sending out my hundredth template-letter of the day requesting consent to republish online an article from a Granta back issue. A mammoth and at times Beckettian-seeming task, which revolved around badgering people with far more interesting things to do. I was, however, occasionally surprised by a fluke reply granting permission for a piece that I, as a Granta reader years before, had adored.

What’s more, not only did the thrill of receiving the signed letter recall the memory of reading the piece – in this case Tim Adams's wonderfully balanced story about the fox-hunting debates – but along with it came a second, still better, thrill. This piece of writing was now going to be available to people on the far side of the world, where foxes are white, or of the desert variety with large, heat-radiating ears; or perhaps a part of the world without foxes altogether – just as long as there is an internet connection.

From Granta’s re-launch in 1979, before which it had been a Cambridge University magazine since 1889, the Online Archive offers a viewpoint from which to see, across the whole spectrum of issues, how the themes and look of the magazine have changed over the decades. For anyone interested in the undercurrents that run through new writing, the Online Archive offers a teeming and invaluable resource.

While there will be some who fear the journey from page to screen, the medium is not the message – and in the case of good writing, nothing gets lost in the ether. Pixels do not sully a finely sculpted phrase, they simply illuminate it. The gift of digitization, in fact, is that for the first time ever it is possible to view the entire sweep of Granta’s history in a few clicks.

Read also... artistic director Michael Salu on his design for the latest Granta cover, with a slideshow of work-in-progress images.

Granta 111: Going Back will be published in the UK on Thursday 15 July, and the USA on 26 July. The issue launched with a special event at the British Library on the 12th of July – with Salman Rushdie, Elizabeth McCracken, Richard Russo and A.L. Kennedy. Click here to read about the event.