Number Nineteen

Produced in December 2011 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. Coming March 2012.

Number Eighteen

Margin Call

Produced in December 2009 in Chicago, Washington, and New York “after having been painstakingly ghostwritten by Bill Ayres.” Published January 2010. 178 pages. $12.

Number Seventeen

Superslayer Storybook

“Well, we’ll come right out and admit it. It’s been some time since you’ve heard from us.” Produced in Chicago in June 2006 in an apartment in The Flamingo Hotel. 96 pages, $10.50.

Number Sixteen

Nascar, How Proud a Sound!

As this issue went to press in June 2003, the Bafflers began to rebuild their charred headquarters. “We’re pouring the concrete and getting ready for the steel. If luck and money hold out, the roof should be on by winter.” 96 pages, $7.50.

Number Fifteen

Civilization With a Krag

Produced in November 2002, “shuttling between Dan Raeburn’s pied-a-terre in the fashionable Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago and our spread in Woodlawn. Our building is still a shell.” 96 pages, $7.50.

Number Fourteen

The God That Sucked

Produced in Spring of 2001. “On April 25, years of incendiary cultural criticism finally achieved ignition. A pre-dawn fire swept through our office, awakening residents of Chicago’s South Side to the unmistakable smell of burning Bafflers.” 120 pages, $7.50.

Number Thirteen

Vox Populoid

Produced in October 1999. 120 pages, $7.50.

Number Twelve

Then Came Nylon

Produced in March 1999. 128 pages, $7.50.

Number Eleven

Mid-Cult Today

“The Baffler was produced by its editors in the summer of 1998, without benefit of focus groups, town-hall meetings, phone polls, beeper studies, or, in fact, any input from the public at all.” 128 pages, $6.

Number Ten

The Folklore of Capitalism

“Please note that The Baffler is, yes, still an independent magazine. It’s not owned by anybody, unless you count its editors.” 128 pages, $6.

Number Nine

Interns Built the Pyramids

The labor issue, co-published with Fantagraphics Books. “The Baffler takes its particularly unhappy tone from the works of Dead Moon, Sleater Kinney, the Motards, the soundtrack to Dutch Harbor, and Harlan County, U.S.A.” 128 pages, $6.

Number Eight

The Cultural Miracle

“Please be warned: much of the material that follows is polemical in nature. It may seek to persuade you of something.” Produced in February 1996. 128 pages, $5.

Number Seven

The City in the Age of Information

“No, we don’t have an e-mail address. Or a telephone, either.” Produced in Chicago in June 1995. 128 pages, $5.

Number Six

Dark Age

The largest issue to date, this one was produced in November and December 1994, totalled 192 pages, sold for $5.

Number Five

Alternative to What?

Produced in November 1993 in the tiny office of WHPK-FM, at the University of Chicago’s Reynolds Clubhouse. “The large screen of their computer and access to their gigantic record library made the task much easier than before. The nearby roof was perfect for cookouts and drunken stumbling.” 168 pages, $5.

Number Four

Twenty-nothing

“Dedicated to the memory of our friends gone under to the brainwash of corporate jobs, the intense and enthusiastic gone salesmen or congressional staffers; those we slammed with, now in the military, hopeless on the dole, struggling on for the long lost cause in small college towns, and otherwise dead.” Produced over three weeks in November 1992 on a Macintosh computer in Chicago. Published Winter/Spring 1993. 134 pages. $5.

Number Three

Let's Deviance!

Laid out in a four-day marathon session in suburban Kansas City, this issue was printed on a Macintosh laser printer there in the Winter/Spring 1992. At 107 pages, it sold for $5.

Number Two

Suburbia

Produced at the University of Chicago, the editorial statement for number 2 tilted against slick postmodern advertisements. “In 1990 ‘avant-garde’ means something closer to being the first on the block to wear a Batman T-shirt than it does to inventing a truly meaningful, penetrating representational (or abstract) technique.” Published two years after number one, in the summer of 1990, it totaled 48 pages and sold for $3.

Number One

The first Baffler, produced in Charlottesville, Virginia during the summer of 1988. A line from Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations serves as the epigraph: “Ce poison va rester dans toutes nos veines même quant, la fanfare tournant, nous serons rendu à l’ancienne inharmonie.” At 48 pages, it sold for $2.