later, the Comag representative called to give me a breakdown on the new sales push. He was ashen. Soon, I was ashen, too. They had managed to sell in only 6,000 copies and still expected a few returns. He beat his breast a bit and promised renewed effort. I saw him out and returned, crest-fallen, to the office - where a party was now taking place. I didn't understand. I had doubled the circulation - the real circulation.

All offices are eccentric, but magazine offices are more so. At Quarto, the two basement rooms from which we operated were rent-free but occasionally this left us vulnerable to the owner's grace and disfavour. When he had a drink taken, he might come down for a friendly chat, become irascible at some turn in the conversation, and explode: 'get that earring out of your ear - in fact, get your earring out of my house - in fact, get this whole operation out of my house.' And we would be banned. The first time this happened, I rang Richard Boston in a panic. He was amused and totally unworried. 'Stay away for a couple of days, then just go back. He never remembers.' True, he didn't seem to and one was quickly back at the desk under the broken window. So what is the attraction of magazines? Excitement, mischief and the sense that you are helping to make literary history. At Quarto, I published the first work by Adam Mars-Jones and Kazuo Ishiguro and both were quickly taken up by Faber. As editor, you felt it was you who lit the blue touch-paper. Little magazines are easily patronised - the Little Review once published a blank issue as a protest against the lack of great art, T S Eliot's The Criterion had a circulation of about four hundred. And yet it was Eliot's magazine that spurred me into starting Areté - I read it in the Bodleian library's Upper Reading Room and was inspired by the seriousness of its enquiry. Eliot's approach is sometimes dismissed as a seriousness of demeanour only. But The Criterion survives on the sheer interest of its contents. It began with no editorial, no programme - but with a disposition towards 'classicism', a term whose meaning is defined only in opposition to 'romanticism'. The classical temper is against emotional excess, against prizing strong feeling for its own sake. It is determined to exercise reason. Its modern representative is Milan Kundera, who exclaims in Testaments Betrayed: 'Will we ever be done with this imbecile sentimental Inquisition, the heart's Reign of Terror?' The classical is permanently at war with sentimentality - of thought as well as emotion. In The Sacred Wood, Eliot lays down the only sure critical method - to be very intelligent. I think we could do with more of that intelligence.

And obviously my contributors agree. They certainly aren't doing it for the money. No one is being paid. Not me. Not them. Not Jeremy Noel-Tod, my assistant editor - whose wages are a rent-free room in my house and food with the family. Not Richard van den Dool, the brilliant Dutchman who designed the cover for nothing, not the gifted Mark Alexander who drew the Areté feather for the logo, not Richard Ryan and his wife Elizabeth who are designing the web-site. Not Ian McEwan, Harold Pinter, Patrick Marber, William Boyd, Frederic Raphael, Peter Ho Davies, Wendy Cope or Frances Stonor Saunders - who are all in the first issue along with five unpublished letters of T S Eliot to James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, W B Yeats and Lady Rothermere, the first patron of The Criterion. All unpaid - in advance. A first.

Craig Raine, October 2000

Many thanks to Craig Raine for his enthusiastic involvement with Bibliomania and Well Red Magazine. You can read essays and other selections from Areté in the "articles" section of Well Red and buy complete editions by clicking "Buy" on the navigation bar. New collections of Craig Raine's poetry and essays are also available through BOL and Amazon, and we will be reviewing them in the near future.