Here’s what Jason Pettus has to say about CCLaP Journal #1:

Happy day! The first issue of CCLaP’s new monthly magazine is now here! Regular readers will of course know the long, twisted road that has eventually gotten us to this point: how growing pains here at the center has recently made me decide to bring on three more book reviewers for the blog besides Karl Wolff and myself; but how I wanted to make sure I could pay these writers so that I can guarantee the best long-form reviewers out there; but how I don’t actually have any extra money these days to pay such writers; so how I’ve decided to start bundling up the content we run here at the blog every day, and selling it for US$5 at Amazon and iTunes, plus a free PDF you can download here at the website, a free “flippable” online version at Issuu.com, and a rather expensive (US$25 plus shipping) print-on-demand paper version at MagCloud.com. I knew this very first issue would take longer than normal, since I would be setting up all the templates and determining the design scheme for the first time; but I’m happy to say that it’s now finished and ready for your downloading pleasure. As you can see from the screenshots above, I’m incredibly happy with how the finished document looks; as we’ve been discussing over at Facebook this week, as I’ve shared various sneak preview images, there’s something almost alchemically magical about converting this content from a blog format to a traditional magazine one, something that makes it turn from just a mass of blog posts to a very real object of legitimate value. Anyway, you can pick up a copy yourself through the following links…

Right-click here for the free PDF (caution: 29 megs) / Make a voluntary donation
Click here for the free onscreen Issuu.com version
Click here to purchase the US$25 paper version at MagCloud.com

Unfortunately, it turns out that the Amazon and iTunes versions are going to be more difficult than I first thought: turns out that you can’t just upload a PDF at iTunes but literally have to program an entire app for your magazine, while Amazon doesn’t let you load fixed-layout documents at all, but rather tries to convert PDFs into messy, nearly unreadable Kindle documents. Anyway, I’ll be working on both those challenges over the next several weeks; but I at least wanted to get the PDF version up right away, so that people can start checking it out. This officially means now that we’re ready to start accepting job queries from people who would like to be paid staff writers; so check out this first issue of the magazine, and if you think you can do exactly what you see here, drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com and let me know. I look forward to hearing from you, and I hope you enjoy this first issue of what will hopefully be an ongoing and popular project here at CCLaP.

Addendum: It is a delightfully strange turn of events, as newsstand diehard Newsweek recently went to an all-digital edition, CCLaP ventures into the realm of print-on-demand.

Addendum II: My second essay series, the NSFW Files, will debut on CCLaP this Friday with an essay about Petronius’s ribald romp through the Roman Empire, The Satyricon.