Heine was one of the contributors to a short-lived journal that briefly crossed my path in New York, where its owner had evidently made good his escape from Hitler's Europe: the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher ("German-French Annals") edited in Paris by Dr Karl Marx, not yet famous but already enjoying a local notoriety, and his fellow exile Arnold Ruge. Only one volume of this annual ever appeared, in 1844, but it includes Marx's first substantial publication: Zur Judenfrage ("On the Jewish Question"). Scholars disagree about the originality of this work, but it is significant both as the first outline of the "materialist" philosophy of history, and as a radical new departure in the history of anti-Judaism. I found the annual in the rare books department of the Strand Bookstore, but the staff there had no idea what it was. It had no price, but they promised to give me one when they had checked it out. After nearly an hour I was still waiting, and the young assistant informed me that she had been unable to locate a single copy of this obscure volume in any library, so would I mind if they emailed me later with a price? My heart sank. Later that day, my fears were confirmed: the price was well over a thousand dollars — still a bargain, given the rarity of this periodical and the world-historical importance of its contents, but beyond my means. It later sold for far more. 

I would have shelved the periodical that got away alongside the rest of my modest collection of early Marxist literature, which includes several volumes of the original MEGA, the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, edited in Moscow in the 1920s and early 1930s by David Riazanov. This formidable scholar, a close ally of Trotsky, produced excellent, unexpurgated editions of the works and correspondence of Marx and Engels, handsomely bound in navy blue cloth with titles picked out in bold gold capitals. I have before me his edition of Die Deutsche Ideologie ("The German Ideology"), which was published in full for the first time in 1932 — but with Riazanov's name missing from the title page. 

By the kind of black magic familiar to readers of the novel Mikhail Bulgakov was then writing, The Master and Margharita, Riazanov had just been dismissed from the Marx-Engels Institute (of which he was the founder) on evidence extracted under torture from an employee by the secret police. Riazanov disappeared from Moscow, first into internal exile, then altogether; but even Stalin could not erase his achievement in bringing hitherto unpublished MSS by the Communist patriarchs to light, above all The German Ideology. 

Its publication began the rediscovery of the "early Marx" which would galvanise the Left in the 1960s. Nothing else in the Marxist corpus expresses so succinctly the core of the "materialist conception of history", especially the first section, headed "Feuerbach". The manuscript is in Marx's hand and is adorned with doodles of heroic revolutionaries. It is full of aphorisms, for which he later lost the knack: "Consciousness does not determine life; rather, life determines consciousness." Or: "In every epoch the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas." One passage, quoted in the introduction by Riazanov's successor Adoratski, reads ironically today: "The revolution is not only necessary because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but because only in a revolution can the overthrowing class be enabled to clean off the old filth and to lay the foundations of a new society."

 Adoratski comments that the Soviet proletariat is following Marx's injunction, but the "filth" turned out to include tens of millions of the best and brightest who perished on Stalin's orders, including Riazanov himself, who was executed on trumped-up charges in 1938. Marx's German Ideology is intended to open its readers' eyes to the "illusions of the ideologists", and Stalin, who saw the threat to himself implied by this notion, ensured that only 5,000 copies were printed, most of which would have been sent abroad. Editors, being dangerous to tyrants, are always in danger themselves.

One thought torments me: will the periodical survive? Online archives will soon make every book or journal of any significance instantly accessible, albeit at a price. So private libraries like mine may be redundant. But without their physical, tactile reality, who will bother to read them? And who will found new weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies or other periodicals in defiance of the public expectation of instant gratification? 

My own magazine was indeed such an act of defiance, but Standpoint could not have flourished as a purely commercial venture. People balk at a few pounds a copy who do not mind paying thousands for phone or computer services. The defining characteristic of a periodical is the period that its editor requires to put it together. Time, in this case, really is of the essence. But readers accustomed to the internet won't wait for a magazine. They want the intellectual equivalent of fast food. 

As the ultimate deadline looms for the final edition of the only printed periodical left, the last Editor on earth sinks into a reverie, from which she is aroused by a vision of editorial judgment. From the great coffee house in the sky, a convocation of the editors of the past are looking down on the present predicament of the periodical.

"This will never do," says Francis Jeffrey, of the Edinburgh Review. 

"You said that about Wordsworth's ‘Excursion'," replies Marian Evans, of the Westminster Review. "You were wrong then and you are wrong now. The periodical gave me the confidence to write, without which I could never have become the novelist George Eliot. And it will continue to provide the stage for every budding writer."

"With great respect, Miss Evans, you are hopelessly out of date," Cyril Connolly of Horizon observes breezily and wheezily from inside a cloud of smoke. "Nobody down there under 40 reads much of anything any more. It's not the pram in the hall any more that is the enemy of promise — it's the computer in the child's bedroom."

"Is that so?" The sharp rejoinder from the quiet American in clericals commands attention. "Judaism and Christianity are religions of the book," comments Father Richard John Neuhaus of First Things. "People will read if and when they are given something worth reading, regardless of technology. But most magazines are simply dull. Until our colleagues still on earth retake the public square by writing about the great moral and spiritual questions of our, or any, time, readers will remain on strike." 

At this the bewigged gentlemen in the corner looked up. "Dull, sir? Do you mean dull as Gray was dull? He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great," declares Dr Johnson, editor and sole contributor of The Idler. 

"One man's dull digest is another's delight," Richard Steele agrees. "At The Tatler I used to say: ‘It is to be noted that when any part of this paper appears dull there is a design in it.' Anyone who avers that brevity is the soul of wit probably has neither, and certainly has little acquaintance with English letters." 

"Design to be dull? Did you mean that you and Addison deliberately denied good writers room in your gazette? By God, I wish I had lived a century before and you had been able to ask me to write for you!" The spirit of the age now makes his presence felt. Taking a swig from a glass of ambrosia, William Hazlitt gets unsteadily to his feet. "In my day I believed that we lived in retrospect and doted on past achievements. The spirit of the 21st century by no means dotes on the past. In fact, you seem hardly aware of those who came before you. Not only are journalists like us all but forgotten: who but those who are paid to do so reads even the poets of my day — Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats? Who reads Coleridge, who talked on forever, but who you wished to talk on forever? Who reads Burke, whose style was forked and playful as the lightning? I used to hate reading new books, but today you read little else for pleasure — if you read books at all. I used to say that women judge of books as they do of fashions, but now such a fixation on novelty is found equally in both sexes. You do not know what you are missing by ignoring the great writers of the past. Writing is the most difficult of arts, and it cannot be learnt without reading: not widely, necessarily, but deeply. There are 20 or 30 volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire ever to read at all. But how many of these authors would ever have come to my attention had they not first been published and reviewed in periodicals? I myself would never have been heard of at all but for the editors who commissioned me. These unsung midwives who brought us into the world: where are they now?"

The vision fades. The last Editor picks up her pen and returns to the proofs piled up on her desk. In the margin of the last page she writes, in tiny red letters: "That's enough editors. Ed." After a moment, she crosses it out.

The Editor's decision is final — but the Editor herself is provisional. Her survival depends on the readership. For bloggers, the unedited, open-ended anarchy of the web may beckon enticingly: a return to the chaos before creation.  For the rest of us, though, the editorial process is a blessing. We require periodicals, or something like them, to help us to decide what, and especially whom, to read. Readers and writers alike must hope and pray that the final edition will never be the last.