Introduction 

The Watermark was the undergraduate journal at The University of Massachusetts, Boston. I say ‘was’ because, despite what the search engines and websites may tell you, it has been defunct since 2022-2023. It does not exist under that name anymore, and this is something which bothered me tremendously. Firstly, I became bothered that it did not exist but was advertised as existing online. I resolved this by searching for hard copies. Then, I became bothered that the books themselves were vanishing rapidly from the UMass Boston environment, making any reading or research difficult. I resolved this by acquiring every copy of The Watermark, bar one, as well as half the print run of its predecessor Howth Castle, numerous other singleton student publications from 2013-2026, and faculty / departmental print publications. 

Finally, I then became bothered that I had amassed a working archive of publications from roughly the 1970s to 2026 in my bedroom. And I set out to bring order to the boxes and boxes of books. I began with The Watermark and its active printing years of 1993-2023. The Watermark put out roughly 34 books in its multiple decades of publishing. 35, if you include lost and refound digital releases. 

As a result of this curiosity, this article is less about one literary journal than about a preservation problem familiar to museums, archives, and historical societies: how do we reconstruct institutional memory when formal records have disappeared?

On Periodization 

Originally, I became obsessed with print statistics. How many copies of a particular volume were printed? With knowledge about print statistics we can assign hard numbers to something otherwise nebulous. How does one define a Golden Age beyond "aesthetic”? How does one then turn works of art and literature into organizing metrics of overall health and wellness? The answer is, I believe, partly found in how many copies of a magazine were printed. And over a long enough timeline, one can take this data and line it up to see what it tells you. And it tells us that The Watermark declined slowly, and then suddenly, with structural problems seeming small before the accumulation of them proved too great to overcome. 

This work required a specific intervention: periodization. One thing surprised me almost immediately. The journals themselves naturally sorted into four historical periods. I hadn't planned to periodize them; the evidence forced me to. We could not just look at roughly 30 years of publishing as a whole, it became infinitely more manageable to split The Watermark into semi-contained periods of history based on aesthetics, print runs, and funding patterns, and after doing this I walked away with four distinct eras of student publication at UMass Boston. 

Rough Early Stage Period (1993-2002)

The earliest versions of The Watermark bore aesthetic and morphological (meaning size, shape, and density) similarities to copies of Howth Castle, before beginning to drift in color scheme (from dark blacks, bright whites, and grays in Volume 1-5) to blues (Volumes 6-9) Independently confirmed UMass testimony in the shape of a news article from Evan Sicuranza in 2002 reports that, at least in 2002, volumes of The Watermark were printed at 4,000 per year. It does not say “this” year or “past years”. It says “per year”, which implies stability backwards beyond just the year 2002. Further speculation beyond this is unwise, but the regimented consistency means that even if it is not exactly 4,000, it could be 3,500 or 3,000. 

The Golden Age Period

Based on interviews with former student editors between 2002 and 2009 (Volumes 10-19) there were around 2,000 to 4,000 copies per year. I am using 2,000-4,000 copies as a deliberate spectrum.

Firstly, because I have confirmed editorial recollections which state the following:


There is, as we can see, fluctuation sometimes to a very large degree (it is still unknown to me what was going on between Fall 2005 and Spring 2005 that resulted in a 1,500 copy decline?) but overall, there was consistency within the established framework. At the highest, it was almost par to Early Stage Period print runs. At the lowest, it was half the total copies printed, but held in overall aesthetic consistency, support, and the existence of consistent institutional and departmental prize support.  

Volumes may have had quadruple digit declines in print runs, but these numbers still greatly surpassed what we see in the Late Stage Period. For example, the only confirmed number we have is 2018, with around 750 copies printed. To put this in perspective, we are looking at a decline of roughly 1,250 copies if we compare Volume 13 from 2005 to 2018 numbers. This number only goes up if you compare it to Volume 9, in 2002. Compared to Early Stage Watermark, there were 3,250 less copies printed in 2018. 

The Middle Period (2009-2015)

Data here is borderline nonexistent as I could find it, so no speculation on print statistics will be attempted. I will say, however, that it is around this period something interesting began to happen. Starting with Volume 19 in 2010, The Watermark began to develop the morphological drift that would define the Late Stage Period. Volume 19 was a tabloid magazine in terms of its construction and shape and size. Volumes 20, 21, 22, 23, and 24 all had attempts at consistency that could be broken up roughly, I suspect, by the editor. 20 and 21 had the same art, dimensions, and colors. Volume 23 (given its nature as a rosetta stone massive anniversary volume) was an exception, but Volume 24 maintained the same shape, if not the same density. 

Late Stage Period (2016-2022)

The morphology of  Late Stage Period books must now be addressed. There exists no identifiable continuity between volumes beyond the logo and the fact they say The Watermark or Watermark on them. Volumes 25-35 are, as a collection, chaotic. I suspect this has to do not just with the documented contraction in staff size (often just 1 person working on it by the 2020s!) but also because editors themselves were given money and freedom, according to sources I have who requested anonymity. Each Volume after potentially even Volume 19 in 2010 was, for lack of a better term, left to the whims of the editors. 

As a result of this the Late Stage Period can be considered a series in name and geography only. We can call the Golden Age Period the Golden Age Period because there is very little aesthetic difference to differentiate Volumes. With the Late Stage Period differences are so pronounced that we can point to an issue and say: This is the So-And-So Edition because this Volume is saddle stitched and digest sized, whereas this is the This-Person Edition because this Volume is 6x9 and perfect bound in comparison to this, the Someone-Else Edition which is almost 6x6. 

The only two data points we have for this period, in terms of actual statistics, are that in 2018 750 copies were printed of that year's / semester's release. The rest is editorial reporting, consistently stated as some variation of:

“I don’t remember exactly, but it was under around 1,000.”

I am inclined to believe that it was under, and consistently under, by several hundred. Keep in mind that in 2013 we have the first sign of documented funding cuts via optional fees. By 2016, just 3 years later, these funding cuts had become institutionalized and were being documented in editor’s notes almost apologetically. 

I would like to conclude this essay by stating that I do not think it wise or even acceptable to blame the student editors during the Middle Period or especially the Late Stage Period for inconsistency in book morphology. Many of them, as our Questionnaires show, were one person shows. There was no demonstrably no staff. Little to no continuity or culture, in their own words.  No real communal history or support for these students, meaning that each of them had to reinvent the wheel with every release. Therefore, of course every release looks different. These students were starting from scratch almost every time, so these Middle Period and Late Stage Period volumes were reflections of themselves and their learning / editorial process.

Conclusion

After these findings were written down I was forced to consider the fact that I was not documenting literary institutions, but the loss of institutional memory. Most importantly, I was documenting the fact that institutions rarely disappear all at once. They fade as knowledge, mentorship, and documentation fail to pass from one generation to the next. UMass just happened to generate, over multiple decades, significant documentation which was available for one MA student with a bit too much curiosity and access to little free libraries, and abandoned shelving on campus. 

Furthermore, the absence of records was itself historically meaningful. The books existed, and some of the secondary data on print statistics existed. It had not been correlated before, to my knowledge. By looking at the whole publication history laid out on my kitchen table in four small stacks, I came to see the journals not just as containers for poetry and prose but as artifacts whose physical forms recorded three decades of institutional history.  

UMass Boston happened to leave behind enough scattered evidence in the form of  publications, newspaper articles, editor recollections, and surviving copies that the story could still be reconstructed. Many local institutions leave behind similar fragments. The challenge is recognizing that those fragments belong to the same history and catching them all before the window closes, and they are lost.