The first issue of Grosseteste Review appeared in the spring of 1968 and the last volume, number fifteen, was published in 1984. As I mentioned in my earlier article on the Grosseteste Press, the initial aim had been to publish three issues of the new magazine each year, but this remarkable publication was to undergo some significant changes over the sixteen years of its existence. It was also to lend its name to Grosseteste Review Books which began in 1972 with John Hall’s diary of poems titled Days. When the magazine’s founding editor, Tim Longville, produced his Grosseteste Descriptive Catalogue in 1975 he devoted the last few pages to the Review itself and quoted some significant comments upon the way the whole venture had been received, ranging from John Freeman’s assertion in Cambridge Quarterly that it was ‘Widely regarded as the best of the little magazines’ to Peter Finch’s celebration in Second Aeon: ‘And amidst all the shouting Grosseteste goes quietly on, a solid and often brilliant magazine.’

The first issue had been printed on the Stonefield Avenue Grosseteste Press and  consisted of forty-eight pages, of which thirteen were prose. Gordon Jackson gave a very clear account of the early stages of the magazine when he wrote that it was all ‘in handset type’ but that it was here that the first problems started:

The only way to make it easier was to get the prose set outside and do the poetry etc by hand, which we eventually did by ...