Why we still print on paper

Poems are made to be slow

A poem on a screen has to compete with everything else on that screen: the message at the top, the next email waiting below, the small itch to scroll. Most of the poems we publish are short, and short poems need to be read twice. A screen rarely lets you.

There is a plain practical reason too. Paper does not need charging, updating or remembering. A copy left in a waiting room or a staff kitchen is read by people who would never sign up for an email, and some of them write to us afterwards.

On paper, a poem gets the whole page. There is white space around it, nothing moves, and nothing asks you to do anything next. You can fold the corner down. You can leave it on the kitchen table for a week and read it again on Thursday.

We send one poem by email every Sunday night, and we always will. But four times a year we print the best of them, and those four issues are the heart of what we do.

The kettle knows the hour before I do;
it hums the sleeping house a shade of blue.

That couplet was one of our most-read emails last year. When it arrived on paper in the fall issue, three readers wrote to say they had cut it out and stuck it above their own kettles. Nobody has ever told us that about an email.

What printing costs

Each issue is 32 pages, printed on uncoated paper by a small press in Frome and mailed in a plain envelope. We charge $6 an issue, and this is where it goes:

• Printing, 32 pages$3.40
• Envelope and shipping$1.10
• To the poets$1.50

We pay every poet we print, and we would like to pay them more. That is the main reason the print run is still small: 1,200 copies, most of them already promised to subscribers.

We have looked at cheaper printers more than once. The savings were real, about 60¢ an issue, but the paper was thinner, the ink sat on the surface, and the poems looked as if they were in a hurry. We stayed where we are.

What we will not do

We will not add adverts, and we will not print on glossy paper to look grander. We will not hide the poems behind a paywall either: everything we print is also sent free by email on a Sunday night, a few weeks later.

If you only ever read us on a screen, that is fine. If you would like to hold the poems, the winter issue goes to the printer on 1 December.