Now (1940–1947 magazine)

NOW was a British political and literary magazine which George Woodcock founded in April 1940, while he was living in his mother's house in Marlow, Buckinghamshire and working in a variety of posts in the headquarters of the Great Western Railway at Paddington Station, London.

Woodcock was prompted to start Now because of the closure of Horizon, which he rejected as being 'too much of a mandarin journal to continue the avant garde role of such little mags of the late 1930s as Twentieth Century Verse and Contemporary Poetry and Prose. Consequently, faced with a 'sudden silencing of voices', he decided to start a magazine 'for young and disaffected writers'.

The first issue appeared, in the spring of 1940, 'as a cyclo-styled sheet', for which Woodcock received financial help from a group of local pacifists. In his Introduction to Now, he wrote that Now 'would seek to "perpetrate good writing and clear thought.' He later elaborated: 'Now was established early in the war as a review for publishing literary matter and also as a forum for controversial writing which could not readily find publications under wartime conditions, and stated that its writers 'included Anarchists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, pacifists, and New Statesman moderates.'

Two further issues were produced, which were printed, by the autumn of 1940. In March 1941, Now was 'restarted on a more ambitious scale, with a wider range of contributors' Woodcock recalled:

'Four numbers appeared. By the last, No. 7, I had come to realise the justice of a criticism made by Julian Symons, in which he attacked the "free expression" policy, which had united in one so many incompatible opinions, and contended that a small magazine was only justified if it represented a defined attitude.'

The first seven issues of Now came to be called the 'Old Series'. The magazine wasn't published in 1942 because of what George Fetherling called, in his biography of Woodcock, 'the turmoil in Woodcock's personal and political lives'. Consequently, Woodcock launched the next series in 1943. It was published by Freedom Press and comprised nine volumes, the last one of which was dated July–August 1947. Among the many articles that were published in Now, Volume 5 included "Sexuality and Freedom", by Marie-Louise Berneri, the Italian anarchist, which was one of the first discussions of the ideas of Wilhelm Reich in Britain.