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Back in the olden days, of the Harvey Birdmans of yore, Harvey’s boss (voiced competently by one Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report fame) discussed the Ampersand, that clever conjoining twin of thought. The love for the Ampersand is a strange thing, often falling into the wayside of things. AT&T, Ben & Jerry, they are corporate playthings. Nobody wanted this. Nobody asked for this. The ways of the Ampersand deserved better.
The Ampersand was first developed in the late 16th Century by Bohemian Monks in what is now the present-day Czech Republic. It was a way of documenting everyone who got defenestrated, a surprisingly popular practice of pushing people in power out of windows as a form of ridicule. Much of the populace loved pushing those in power out of windows, because the Czechs have always been on the vanguard of cultural shifts. Influential people who were forced out of windows initially tried to crack down on the publication of their names, but soon changed their tune. After establishing GoFundMe to raise money to recover from the falls, the nobility in the Czech Republic sought to ensure they could receive the funds, which they could then use to lend money to the Habsburgs in exchange for Liechtenstein. Now, the Ampersand was intended to facilitate spacing in printing, allowing as many names as possible to fit within the allotted paper.
Since the decline of print media and the shift into the digital era, many literary works have overlooked this important aspect of history. Not the good folks at &. They remember everything. Up in the Canadian wilderness, staying warm by the fire, they have continued the fine tradition. Devotion is so absolute that they even put out quite frankly beautiful print magazines that look as if they were some Vaporwave artist generator’s wet dream. Colors are present, and this contrasts strongly with the typical website’s black-and-white décor. You can even get little PDFs of them, which is a lovely little taste of what the real-life version might look like, for those readers without the necessary funds, in other words, regular readers, because reading is for poor people.
A lovely little site that publishes according to the schedule of whenever the hell they feel like it, I appreciate the consistency in care alongside the inconsistency in publishing schedules. Time is not much of a thing in literature; it is everlasting, like those Gobstoppers you ate as a child from your Halloween basket.
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