Several recent publications have begun to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge about the role which literary journals, particularly the “little” magazines, have played in the literary life of Latin America. Some of the more important of these are: Boyd Carter’s Las revistas literarias de Hispanoamérica; breve historia y contenido (México, 1959); Sturgis E. Leavitt’s Revistas hispanoamericanas: Índice bibliográfico (Santiago de Chile, 1960); John E. Englekirk’s “La literatura y la revista literaria en Hispanoamérica,” Revista Iberoamericana, XXVII (1961), 9-79, 219-279; XXVIII (1962), 9-73; XXIX (1963), 9-66; and the G. K. Hall Company’s Index to Latin-American Periodical Literature, 1929-1960 (8 vols., Boston, 1962, with a supplement published in 1963). In Mexico alone it is gratifying to note that the Índices de El Domingo (México, 1959), the Índices de El Nacional (México, 1961), both of them the work of Ana Elena Díaz and others, and Humberto Batis’ Índices de El Renacimiento (México, 1963), have recently appeared. Also the series of lectures sponsored in 1962 by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes and published in Las revistas literarias de México (2 vols., México, 1963 and 1964) attest to a quickening interest in the contributions which such literary journals have made to Mexico’s literary development.
Merlin Forster’s volume joins this swelling list of bibliographical aids which Mexicanists welcome with enthusiasm. It includes indices for sixteen journals: Antena (1924), Contemporáneos (1928-1931), Estaciones (1956-1960), Fábula (1934), La Falange (1922-1923), Forma (1926-1928), El Hijo Pródigo (1943-1946), México Moderno (1920-1923), Poesía (1941), Prometeus (1949), Romance (1940-1941), Ruta (1938-1939), Sagitario (1926-1927), Taller (1938-1941), Tierra Nueva (1940-1942), and Ulises (1927-1928). Given the sweeping title which Professor Forster has chosen for his work, users will be disappointed to find that at least two journals of the utmost importance, El libro y el pueblo and Letras de México, are not included “because of the unavailability of complete collections” (p. 5), notwithstanding the fact that the Union List of Serials seems to indicate that nearly complete collections exist in several places. Indeed, the University of Texas and the Library of Congress could probably fill the gaps in their collections by some judicious borrowing.
While incomplete, this work is nevertheless a useful contribution to scholarship as far as it goes. In Section I articles contained in the listed journals are arranged by authors. Section II provides an index of all places where the name of a given author appears, as well as useful listings of subjects (e.g., drama, education, etc.).
The book is printed by offset and suffers from poor typing. While actual misspellings are not overly numerous, instances of bad spacing and faulty underlining are plentiful. Even more disconcerting are innumerable eases of incorrect syllabification or accentuation of Spanish words.
