This (Parenthetical) Preface appears in The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant . It constitutes the raison d'être of the zine, and what its current manifestation as a "best of" anthology.

Somewhere in 1996, during in the long, hazy hours of Gavin's temp job, and encouraged by the literary atmosphere of Boston bookstore Avenue Victor Hugo, where Kelly was then working, we decided to start a zine. Why not? We had access to a photocopier, and we knew some writers. Gavin walked by a travel agency advertising a $300 tropical vacation and decided that for that kind of money he'd have more fun making a zine. (With hindsight, $300 is also a lot of books and beer.) Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet was inspired as much by pop culture (Ben is Dead, Don't Shoot It's Only Comics) and personal zines (Doris, Leeking Inc) as by the suspicion that the kind of hybrid genre/literary fiction that we liked best was underrepresented in the magazines that we read.

We ran twenty-six copies of the first issue of LCRW off on someone's photocopier. (We numbered it Vol. 1, No. 1.) It wasn't pretty, but it sold through. When we started to put together our second issue, we upped the print run and found a size and design we liked (it was stapled then, it's still stapled now). We began to solicit fiction from newer writers, including Nalo Hopkinson and Dora Knez. Our goals since then haven't changed much. We want to publish a mix of new and established writers. We want to publish work that surprises us. We want to have fun and break even.

The Best of LCRW represents ten years of photocopied stories, a continued commitment to sending chocolate bars, intact and more or less unmelted, through the mail (see the subscriptions page at the back), and many—too many—late nights spent struggling with Word, PageMaker, Quark, and now InDesign. That we still spend those late nights reading submissions, laying out pages, and addressing mailing labels, is thanks to the many wonderful writers who continue to send us their best and oddest work.* And thanks, also, to the subscribers and casual browsers who have picked up a zine with a very odd title at bookstores like Dreamhaven, Borderlands, Powell's, Prairie Lights, and Quimby's.

Perhaps you're wondering about the name. Let's just say it cost us quite a few pennies in consultancy fees from a famous marketing firm, a group of people (corporation sounds so corporate) so well known we don't feel the need to name them—let's just say that they were the first agency to name trees after subdivisions. We wanted something simple and mimetic: a single word that would summarize everything you (yes, you) wanted from a magazine, a word that would intrigue you so much you had to buy that word, had to take it home where you would ignore your roommate and/or your kids and your little dog, too, because you had to read it now. But it turned out that Fiction, Story, Zine, Playboy, Naked People, and Free Money Inside were either already in use, or else presented legal difficulties. Eventually, for entirely other than commercial reasons, we named ourselves after the rosebuds that Winston Churchill's mother, Jennie Jerome, was reported to have had tattooed around her wrist.** Fascinating woman, Lady C., fascinating.

Over the course of the past ten years, we've published over two million words' worth of fiction, poetry, reviews, and lists in LCRW. (If Gavin's questionable breakfast-table math is correct.) We've felt for a long time that the writers we include in LCRW deserve a much wider readership than the one we can reach by publishing a twice-a-year zine and we were ecstatic when Jim Minz, our editor at Del Rey, agreed with us. (Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Chris and Fleetwood and Betsy.) If we could have, we would have included more material from each issue in this anthology, and over the last year, while working on this project, we thought about how to accomplish this. We considered shrinking the font size and including a magnifying glass. Losing the margins. Offering a supplement. Leaving out all punctuation marks. (We did that once by mistake and we're still apologizing. Sorry, Richard.) But in the end, we drew straws, made up lists, argued a lot (but friendly arguing—over drinks, not knives), and then left out some of our favorite stories. So this is really The Best of LCRW . . . So Far. Since we intend to keep putting out our zine, at some point we'll just have to do another one.

Hope you enjoy digging around in here as much as we enjoyed putting it all together.

Two notes about the zine:

1. LCRW comes out twice a year. Should you wish a third issue, please send us a check for $1,000. That issue will be the Your-Name-Here Issue.

2. A new literary award. We believe everyone is special (even those people who don't read--or write for--LCRW, but this award is not for them). Here is the press release: Northampton, MA. LCRW and Small Beer announces The Eponymous Award, given to all writers on publication in LCRW of their writing. So, Bob Smith has been awarded the Bob Smith Award for Fiction Writing. Jane Smith has been awarded the Nonfiction Award. D.K. Smith has been awarded the Poetry Award. You get the idea. In fact, for getting this far, you deserve an award. You have just been awarded the Reader Who Reads Notes Award (fill in the year here_____). Congratulations!

* So, okay, there's one writer whose work we cannot include here and whose name we cannot tell you, as, when he (or she) withdrew his/her work, she/he also requested that all mention of their submission be erased from any public records. That was in issue 18, which came out in June 2006 (or so, you know how it is). Oh, how we hated to leave out that story. We missed it so much that we left a space for it in our Table of Contents in issue 18. In putting together this anthology, we could not not include that gap. We also wrote down the writer's name on the back of a Green & Black's chocolate bar label, put the label in a St. Peter's Best Bitter bottle, and tossed it into the sea. Somewhere out there and all that.

**According to the biographies we read, it was either a snake or a rosebud. We like rosebuds more than snakes. (Gavin does. Kelly prefers snakes, actually.)