Cover of sig A, Cannon Magazine

(Potential) Editorial (1) by Phil Baber

'I wandered through the courtyards and galleries, on the ramparts and glacis, in the fortified and covered ways and along the watchman's paths. It seemed to me I was inside someone's head. This masterly, complicated and well-conceived construction of impregnable breastworks, bastions, salients and redoubts appeared to me like a petrified cast of the brain, and in these halls of stone, among the iron grilles and the chevaux de frise, I stumped along on my crutches, aggressive and vicious as a crippled thought inside the mind of man, thought in its solitude, thought in its liberty. Every opening on to the outside world is an embrasure for a cannon.'

If this magazine (as an opening on to the outside world) hopes to provide cover for literary artillery, then this first issue is fortifying the defences, providing a base from which future issues can direct their aim. Our garrison’s totem will be the Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars; the start (or end) point for the first issue’s content.

[...]

In this first issue we will be feeling our way; blind, uncertain, clutching onto what we can find, running with it, tripping up. Starting again. There is no Grand Plan. We will explore the past where it seems fecund, and hail the future when we can conjure it, but all this is with the aim of establishing our position within the continuous present -- working out where to stick our flag.

Phil Baber secures my eternal fanboy love by opening his Cannon Magazine with a quote from Cendrars' Moravagine.

Phil has worked out an interesting production approach to make his vision a reality:

"This magazine will be broken down into a series of sporadically published sixteen-page signatures, some of which will be distributed as they are printed, and the remainder kept aside to be collated and bound at the end of this project. This staggered approach to production allows Cannon to exist without the crutch of financial support, spreading costs and delaying our inevitable lesson into the impossibility of truly independent publishing. It also means that the left-to-right, east-to-west structure of the finished magazine will correlate to the chronology of its production, the first page having been printed nine months before the last. Section by section the magazine will evolve or renew its standpoint, reflecting my slow digestion of its themes, rather than suggesting a neatly packaged thought which has sprung from the mind, onto the page. Cannon will grow in public."

Drop Phil a line and let him know you care!