About Postscripts Magazine

Postscripts Magazine

Postscripts Magazine, published as Postscripts, was a quarterly British magazine of science fiction, fantasy, horror and crime fiction, first published in June 2004 by PS Publishing of Hornsea in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Edited by Peter Crowther, with Nick Gevers as co-editor in its later years, it ran for twelve years until its final issue, numbers 36/37, The Dragons of the Night, in May 2016. Each issue carried around 60,000 words of fiction and appeared in two editions, a regular edition and a signed, numbered hardcover edition for collectors.

Postscripts won the International Horror Guild Award for best periodical in 2006 and again in 2008, and the British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine in 2009. Individual stories published in it won major awards of their own, including Joe Hill's Best New Horror and Norman Prentiss's In the Porches of My Ears. In a British genre landscape where short-fiction magazines struggled to survive, Postscripts endured by being something more than a magazine in format, while remaining one in spirit: a regular, edited showcase for new genre writing, produced to book standards by a specialist small press.

PS Publishing and Peter Crowther

Postscripts cannot be separated from its publisher. PS Publishing was founded in 1999 by Peter Crowther, and was based in Hornsea, East Riding of Yorkshire. By the time Postscripts launched in 2004, PS had established itself as a specialist in limited-edition genre books, producing signed hardcovers of horror, fantasy and science fiction alongside more accessible editions. Crowther was himself a journalist, short-story writer, novelist, editor and anthologist, whose first published science fiction had appeared in the 1970s, and who received World Fantasy Special Awards as a professional in 2004 and 2008 for his publishing work. The press went on to collect multiple British Fantasy Awards for small-press publishing.

Crowther served as editor-in-chief of Postscripts from its first issue. That continuity gave the magazine a consistent identity rare among genre periodicals, which often change editors as frequently as they change formats. A Postscripts issue reflected a single editorial taste, exercised over twelve years, with Nick Gevers, a respected critic and editor in the field, joining as co-editor in the later period and, by accounts of the magazine's final phase, taking the leading editorial role for its last double issues. Contributors recorded for the magazine's later numbers include Brian Aldiss, Paul Di Filippo, Paul Tremblay, Michael Swanwick, Robert Reed and John Langan, a roster that shows the breadth of the editors' reach across science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Launch in June 2004

The first issue of Postscripts appeared in June 2004, with a spring 2004 dating on its signed edition. A bookseller's description of that first number conveys the ambition: a digest-sized periodical of around 170 pages whose signed edition was limited to 150 copies signed by the contributors, a list that included Ray Bradbury, Peter F. Hamilton and Gene Wolfe among its names. To launch a new short-fiction magazine with contributors of that standing announced that Postscripts intended to compete on quality and prestige rather than on price or newsstand volume.

The timing was counter-intuitive and deliberate. The early 2000s were a difficult period for genre magazines, as distribution shrank and readers migrated online. PS Publishing's answer was to make the physical object desirable. A magazine that collectors wanted to own, in an edition signed by its contributors, could be sold directly to committed readers at a sustainable price, bypassing the economics that were killing conventional newsstand titles. Postscripts was quarterly at launch, a rhythm that allowed long production care for each issue while keeping a periodical identity.

The two-edition model

Each issue of Postscripts was published in two editions: a regular newsstand-type edition and a signed, numbered hardcover edition. The hardcover was limited to 150 copies up to issue 14, and to 200 copies thereafter. The model came directly from PS Publishing's book practice, where signed limited editions served the collector market that sustained the press. Applied to a magazine, it turned each issue into both a reading copy and a collectible artefact.

As the magazine evolved, the balance shifted towards the book format. Later accounts describe the newsstand edition itself becoming a substantial hardcover of more than 400 pages in the double-issue era, with a wraparound cover, and the early trade-paperback form falling away. That drift is characteristic of Postscripts as a whole: it began by imitating a magazine's shape while being produced like a book, and ended by looking like a book while still being edited like a magazine, with numbered issues, a continuing identity and a regular, if slower, schedule.

Sixty thousand words of fiction

Postscripts carried about 60,000 words of fiction per issue, a word count comparable to a short novel in every number. Its remit crossed the genres its publisher served: science fiction, fantasy, horror and crime fiction appeared side by side, rather than in separate specialist titles. That mixture reflected both Crowther's own range as a writer and the reading habits of genre audiences, who commonly move between horror and fantasy, or between crime and the fantastic, more freely than publishing categories suggest.

The magazine's contents were noticed accordingly. Tangent Online, the review venue specialising in short genre fiction, reviewed its issues, and the Internet Speculative Fiction Database catalogued its contents, the standard markers of a periodical taken seriously by the short-fiction field. Reviewers beyond the field also remarked on its strength; one assessment of the anthology phase compared Postscripts favourably with long-established American genre magazines, describing it as a breath of fresh air for readers tired of formulaic short fiction. A British magazine sustaining that reputation across twelve years, in direct comparison with the field's historic titles, was an achievement of editing as much as of publishing.

From magazine to anthology: format evolution

Postscripts changed shape twice without changing its name. From issue 18 it was transformed briefly into a quarterly anthology. Then, from issue 20/21, it moved to a biannual pattern, producing two double-sized issues a year. The double numbering, seen again in the final issue 36/37, preserved the sequence of a magazine while acknowledging that each physical volume now contained the material of two numbers.

The changes were pragmatic responses to the economics of long fiction in print. Bigger, less frequent volumes spread production and postage costs more efficiently, suited the hardcover collector model, and matched the pace at which the editors could commission and select 60,000-word issues to their standard. Rather than diluting the magazine to survive, PS Publishing consolidated it. Readers received fewer, larger issues, and the magazine kept the awards-level quality that its reputation depended on. The final issue, numbers 36/37, subtitled The Dragons of the Night, appeared in May 2016 and closed the sequence with the magazine's identity intact.

Awards for the magazine

Postscripts won the International Horror Guild Award for best periodical in 2006, only two years after launch, and won it again in 2008. In 2009 it won the British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine. Those three honours, from both an international horror body and the British Fantasy Society's awards, established the magazine simultaneously in horror and in the wider fantastic field, matching its mixed contents.

Awards of this kind matter disproportionately for small-press magazines. They signal to contributors that a market will honour their best work, to readers that an unfamiliar title is worth its price, and to booksellers and convention dealers that stock is worth carrying. Postscripts' cluster of wins between 2006 and 2009 coincided with its consolidation into the anthology format, suggesting an editorial operation at its peak rather than one winding down. The magazine maintained its standing for a further seven years after its last major award, a long tail of consistency.

Award-winning stories

The strongest evidence of a fiction magazine's quality is what its stories go on to win, and Postscripts has two exemplary cases. Joe Hill's Best New Horror, published in Postscripts, won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 2006. Hill, then at the start of a career that would make him one of the best-known horror writers of his generation, placed a defining early story in a two-year-old British magazine, and the field's own award confirmed the judgement of the editors who took it.

Norman Prentiss's In the Porches of My Ears, also published in Postscripts, won the 2009 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction, the Horror Writers Association's principal honour. A British small-press magazine thus carried, within three years, both a British Fantasy Award-winning and a Bram Stoker Award-winning story. For contributors deciding where to send their strongest work, and for readers deciding which of many anthologies and magazines to buy, that record was the magazine's best advertisement.

Final issue and closure in 2016

Postscripts ended with issue 36/37, The Dragons of the Night, in May 2016. Its contents, catalogued at the time, ranged across its established mix, with stories by writers including Robert Freeman Wexler, James Cooper, Allen Ashley and John Grant among those listed for the final volume. There was no collapse narrative attached to the ending. PS Publishing continued as a book publisher, and Postscripts closed as a completed twelve-year project rather than as a failed periodical, having outlasted most of the genre magazines launched in the same period.

Twelve years is a substantial life for a short-fiction magazine in the twenty-first century. Across thirty-seven numbered issues, counting its double numbers, Postscripts published hundreds of thousands of words of new genre fiction, sustained a dual-edition collector model, and adapted its format twice to changing economics without surrendering its editorial standard. Its Hornsea base is also part of the record: one of Britain's most decorated genre magazines of its era was produced not in London but from a small town on the East Riding coast, by a press founded there in 1999.

Legacy

Postscripts' legacy rests on a demonstrated alternative model for the genre magazine. Where the conventional newsstand title depended on volume distribution that no longer existed, Postscripts depended on loyalty: direct sales, collector editions, editorial consistency and award-level contents. Its honours, the International Horror Guild Awards of 2006 and 2008 and the British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine of 2009, together with the individual awards won by Hill's and Prentiss's stories, give that model a verified record rather than a nostalgic one.

For WorldNM, Postscripts also documents the strength of Britain's small-press genre tradition in the 2000s and 2010s. PS Publishing's magazine showed that a quarterly founded in 2004 could still, in a digital age, build an international reputation in print, provided the object was worth owning and the fiction was worth reading. Both conditions, on the evidence of its awards, were met.