By Barton Swaim

I can recall many confident predictions that print culture lay on the verge of death. A quarter-century ago, conventional wisdom held that ebooks, read on electronic devices, would replace books made of paper. As newspapers began going digital-only—and then expiring altogether, often as a consequence of their content’s availability online—print’s pre-obituaries circulated frequently.

Then a funny thing didn’t happen. The ebook didn’t vanquish its dead-tree forebear. In fact, demand for traditional print books has increased over the past 20 years and still outstrips that for ebooks. Many magazines and newspapers disappeared or went entirely online, but many didn’t. Print subscriptions at surviving newspapers have dramatically diminished, but a dedicated society of print readers remains. I’m told that some notable percentage of the Gen Z population likes to read print mags, and even, shockingly to me, print newspapers.

The reasons for print’s stubborn refusal to die are many and complex, though perhaps its obituarists should have foreseen that a late-20th-century technological innovation wouldn’t immediately doom a form of human expression dating from the third millennium B.C. What’s notable lately, anyway, are the little signs of print’s resurgence. The New York Sun, for instance, an outlet with which the Journal’s editorial page has long enjoyed friendship, retreated from print to online-only in 2008-09. Relaunched in digital format in 2021, the Sun began a weekly print edition in 2025.

The Journal’s parent company, News Corp, this year launched the California Post, a Los Angeles-based tabloid modeled on the New York Post. The former, like the latter, now appears in print.

County Highway, a broadsheet-style paper published six times a year and edited by Walter Kirn and David Samuels, treats literary and political topics with a small-town sensibility. At County Highway’s website, subscribers can access digital facsimiles of the broadsheet—and not much else. Saveur, a monthly cooking mag—and a favorite of this writer when he first learned to sauté in the mid-1990s—went online-only in 2021 but crept back into print two years later, on a twice-yearly basis. A financially troubled Field & Stream similarly ducked into digital-only status a few years ago; now under new ownership, it appears in the material world again.

I mention all this as backdrop to the launch of another magazine, this one a quarterly, Portico. Its editor is a friend, Micah Mattix, formerly a resident of Virginia, lately of Reverolle, Switzerland. Readers may know Mr. Mattix as proprietor of the books and arts Substack newsletter Prufrock. Portico, begun under the auspices of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, which also publishes First Things, is what was once commonly called a “little” magazine: a periodical devoted to literary subjects, “literary” in the broadest sense, encompassing every area of serious arts and letters. The word “little” describes the numerical size of its readership, though not always of its influence.

The first issue of Portico, containing 84 pages, features authors familiar to readers of the Journal’s opinion pages: Dominic Green on jazz, Dana Gioia on the literary critic Malcolm Cowley, Alan Jacobs on the forgotten film “Make Way for Tomorrow.” (Readers will also notice an essay by a certain Journal columnist, on his unfortunate hometown.) There is also fiction—a story by Mark Helprin—and poetry aplenty. The poetry, I’m happy to report, has a strongly formalist bent; one poem, “The Old Man” by Aaron Poochigian about an ancient Korean War veteran, involves heavy enjambment and an ABAB rhyme scheme. I was moved by it.

Earlier this month the quarterly’s proprietors held a public launch party at the Union League Club in Manhattan. Mr. Mattix hosted a terrific conversation about literature and print culture with Messrs. Helprin and Green and the poet Christian Wiman. All made valuable remarks, but to my surprise the poet, Mr. Wiman, said the most profound thing: “When I am writing,” he said—meaning composing verse—“I have no idea what I’m going to say.” I asked him later what he meant by this. “The sounds of the words when you put them together,” he said. “The sounds make the meaning.”

I am reminded by the appearance of this delightful magazine that my own desultory education happened in large measure in the pages of periodicals. Many were the hours I sat at coffeeshops and bars, or in my little apartment over cheap dinners, reading the Times Literary Supplement, First Things, Commentary, the New Criterion, National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Atlantic and, in its latter days, Partisan Review. In those pages I learned how little I knew and what I might read to remedy my situation. There I also found lessons in putting words in the right order.

Mr. Gioia refers, in his essay on Cowley, to “the golden age of print culture” of the 1920s and ’30s when magazines held enormous sway over public opinion. The golden age came and went, but perhaps we live in a second Bronze Age and a second golden one lies ahead.

Mr. Swaim writes the Unruly Republic column for the Journal.