Introduction

Over the course of its one-hundred-and-fifty-year existence, Swarthmore’s student body has been the object of many an epithetical description. Hippy, communist, hideous, unsanitary, egoistic, elitist, naïve, cripplingly autistic: all of these terms have been used in various contexts to neatly package the Swarthmore pupil.  Such claims may oftentimes contain more than a kernel of truth. Yet the danger of these stereotypical slurs is that they fail to see the silver lining at Swarthmore, viz., that her students are highly, even abnormally, literate. (The claim of literacy at Swarthmore, like all other generalizations, fails to account for exceptions; for example, a student unfamiliar with the function of books was recently overheard in the library ruing the injustice of being unable to complete his latest history paper due to a Wikipedia outage. (Unfortunately, it could not be confirmed that this unhappy soul was a froshperson.) Nevertheless, the ability to read at a fairly high level can be assumed in most cases.)

In an environment so fraught with the potential for intellectual activity, it is hardly surprising that a number of student-led forays into the world of publishing have been endeavored at Swarthmore over the years.  Some of these have stood the test of time to become institutions at the college. Undoubtedly foremost in many students’ minds, not only for its brilliant Arts and Leisure section, but also for its IN DEPTH coverage of topics as diverse as the spouting range of campus water fountains and the Mailbox Crisis of Fall 2005, is the Phoenix, which stands an outside chance of once again rising from the ashes.  Small Craft Warnings has also managed to muscle itself a niche among that significant section of the student body that is enamored of shoddily written verse.  Some publications have even survived their Garnet genesis; that we cannot suggest anything negative about Crawdaddy, started in Paul Williams’ dorm room in 1966 as the first magazine of rock criticism, is due not only to the fact that we don’t know its editor personally, but also to the likelihood that it might actually be worth a read.

Only history (or some other smarmy Young Turk revisionist) will be the ultimate arbiter of where Spike will take its place in this illustrious canon, but for the time being it may be said that this little-rag-that-could has turned into a monster (perhaps more Loch Ness than King Kong, but a monster nonetheless) of the Swarthmore literary scene, one that is eagerly anticipated each semester by its editors, writers, and layout persons, and lukewarmly received by the friends of these people and those members of the student body fortunate enough to be on the receiving end of the semi-annual Spike “tosstribution.” (Several copies of the magazine are also traditionally left on Al Bloom’s porch as part of this process, although feedback from those quarters has been scarce.) The magazine’s longevity is due primarily to two factors: the absurdly generous budget that a forty-thousand-dollar-a-year liberal arts college can provide for the most minute of student-group interests, and its uncanny ability to evolve in these crazy, confused, unstable times.

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