We must now make a brief aside into a non-Watermark publication, which is wholly necessary for reasons which will soon become apparent. In contrast to the next chapters, I will now speak with great confidence. I understand that I am uniquely positioned to discuss distribution patterns of The In-Between  because I happened to be the one in the adjacent room in 2025 when these magazines, Literally, Queeah, and The In-Between, were happening a few doors down for a class on editing and publishing in the MFA. With most of the other independent student publications, they are often orphan copies from a decade plus ago that survived the long, tiring odds by pure chance until someone had to come along and find them. It is a stroke of raw luck that I happened to witness not just the birth of the three aforementioned journals, but something much more important. 

I saw the distribution of one, The In-Between, happen in real time. To begin, I can confirm that this magazine was given a print run of, in total, 30 copies. 

I knew nothing of the class where it was born, but I knew maybe 2/3rds of the students in it. I knew them well enough to be invited to the launch parties, but not well enough I was going to sacrifice my sleep as a struggling, broke, and intellectually fraying graduate student to visit them on a night I did not need to be on campus. 

This is the single greatest regret I have from that semester. But I was around (because it was finals week) to witness how copies of the magazine moved in what I think bears a resemblance to the earlier movement patterns of The Watermark. And more importantly, I remember it with confidence. 

There were ten copies originally in public distribution. Each of the junior editors kept 1 copy according to conversations, so already we have a potential of 30 copies in total, with 26 unaccounted for, by my very rough and potentially incorrect math. More than this is impossible to confirm seeing as how the Editor-in-Chief never responded to my emails. 

 This I remember very clearly, because I counted. But I cannot recall if they all existed on the round circular table in the graduate lounge, or if they all firstly existed on the square rectangular table next to the faculty water cooler where professors leave copies of their class flyers and later migrated to the graduate lounge. For weeks though, they were on that circular table in the graduate lounge. The semester ended, the next began, and ten became five or less. 

Those five or less were moved from the circular table in the graduate table to the squat, square table by the sofa. This table was / is kind of a dumping ground. Four copies of old hardbacks of Shakespeare with a fake plastic plant live on the table, and there is a constant rotation of magazines and journals and newspapers, like the Mass Media on the table. Five copies became three, and these three copies migrated two doors down, diagonally down the hall, into the Teaching Fellow’s private lounge. These three copies sat there for further weeks before, out of some inexplicably morbid curiosity, I took them. 

I did not know why then. My friends will tease me and tell me I have book-kleptomania, but in retrospect if I knew then what I know now I would have grabbed all 10. Remember, only thirty of these books were made. Ten were left on campus. Three made it into a semi-archival state. That’s a full 10% of its entire print run left on campus to be taken and read and distributed, with a further 70% of that number vanishing, and only 30% of those 10 making it into a semi-archived, if unofficial and unsanctioned, status. Let us put this level of rarity into perspective. 

The initial UK printing for JRR Tolkien's The Return of the King in 1955 was 7,000 copies, and 3% of that is 210. In actuality though, the number of UK 1955 printings in pristine, archival condition likely sits in the low double digits, perhaps even numerically comparable with the entire print run of The In-Between. 

This is all done to reinforce the earlier statement that student publications operate like rare books (hard to make, low quantities made, etc.) but have abysmally worse survival rates. They have such abysmally low rates because, even if they are printed in a run of 4,000, like some issues of The Watermark were (still, a 42% decrease in number size from a hardback book from the 1950s.) someone still had to care and think ‘this deserves to be remembered’ at a point other than a 50th University anniversary, or some other large administrative milestone. Others will argue that bureaucratic inertia is real, and that this is the manner of campus culture to be ephemeral. If we accept this argument at face value (which I do not) then the responsibility falls to the campus administration to preserve student culture. Statements of support for student and campus life at current read aspirational instead of tangible. It cannot say that student culture matters on the one hand while on the other, enforcing the conditions by which student culture becomes marginalized, and vanishes into private collections. 

For example, Per Questionnaire #3 and #4, the university archives either knew, or did not know, these journals were being produced. And it was not until I showed them hard copies of my private holdings that conversations about donating ‘one or two copies each’ began to happen. Passively waiting for students as oddly neurotic about student literary culture as myself to come along once every twenty years is not a stable or wise ascension policy.