From student rag to literary riches

Launched in 1979 under the inspired 'lunacy' of Bill Buford, Granta magazine became the home of vital new writing and launched the careers of some of our greatest novelists. As it celebrates its 100th issue, we ask editors past and present how a tiny Cambridge journal rose to conquer the literary world

Simon Garfield writing on Sunday December 30, 2007 in The Observer

Afew minutes after lunching with Ian Jack, who departed as editor of Granta earlier this year after 12 years and 48 issues, I dropped into Quinto, the second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. Granta was about to celebrate its 100th edition, and I wanted some early copies - those classic ones with writing by Richard Ford, John Berger, Martin Amis and Angela Carter. The man at the counter wasn't impressed. 'What's Granta?'

I could have given him the usual: about how it was a river in Cambridge, or the upper part
of one, and its name spawned a student magazine that began in 1889 and was
revived in the late 1970s. I could have said that this magazine became home to
some of the best writing in the English language, and was edited for half its
life by a man, Bill Buford, described to me as 'a crazy, inspiring, absolutely
absurd lunatic'. But instead I said: 'It's a literary magazine, but it looks
like a book.'

'Our literary magazines are in the far corner,' the man said, pointing. He was in his mid-twenties, with a week-old beard. He made me feel uncomfortable, as if I had asked for a
spanking magazine. I went to the far corner, and there were several issues in
fair condition, at £2 each.

One was a reprint of Issue 1 from 1979, which carried a manifesto. Granta, its two editors William Buford and Peter de Bolla wrote, was to be 'devoted to the idea of the dialogue in prose about prose', which was enough to get the reader hurling their new purchase through a
window. Was there ever a more deathly proposal? How could a magazine possibly
get to 100 issues with this as its starting point?

As it turned out, a browser in Quinto unfamiliar with the subsequent Granta pedigree would be amazed and delighted.

Here is Issue 13, with stories by Milan Kundera and Doris Lessing,
and here is number 17, with ruminations by Graham Greene.

Here is Granta 5 from the early Eighties, with a prescient fate-of-the-earth scenario from
Jonathan Schell. Next to it is Granta 12, dominated by Stanley Booth's account
of his high and terrible times with the Rolling Stones at Altamont. And then
there is a more recent one, number 80, with writers looking at old photographs
and remembering old friends, and Granta 65, with Hanif Kureishi and Ian Parker
writing knowingly and enticingly about London.

What distinguishes these random issues from the other magazines on the shelves around them? And what sets them apart from the Paris Review, Harvard Review, the London Magazine and
all the other boutique stars in the literary firmament with their fictions,
poetry, woodcuts, interviews and reviews? Consistency, surprise, self-belief,
originality and, thankfully, the complete absence of a dialogue about prose in
prose. But beyond that: Granta is almost always an exciting and rewarding and
illuminating thing to read. And beyond that: our world would be much the
poorer without it.

I took the first issue to the counter, and on the journey home struggled with a long unbearable piece with no punctuation. And it could have been worse: 'Pete had thought about an
issue called The Theory of the Subject,' Bill Buford tells me when I speak to
him later. 'These were heady times.'
In truth, the first issue wasn't bad, with pieces from Joyce Carol Oates and Susan Sontag, and a superb foretaste of The Tunnel by William Gass. 'It was my way of discovering all
these writers I hadn't read yet,' Buford says (he is American, and his first
editorial wasted no time in dismissing all British writers in favour of his
compatriots). 'I wrote to them all, basically promising them a whole issue of
the magazine. My assumption was that no one would reply, and if anyone did I'd
do anything, because we had nothing."

Buford sounds calm and thoughtful, not at all the lunatic some writers had told me about. But the lunacy lay in the future. In the first weeks in which the two editors
scrambled for material, others took to the streets in search of advertising.
They got some: Woolworths, the Coffee Mill, Sweeney Todds restaurant, Laker
Skytrain, Transalpino. One advert, from the Arts Cinema, listed film times:
Picnic at Hanging Rock was playing on Sunday at 3pm.

Read the rest..........