The Faces
Behind the Scene
at RALPH
Our Average Reader |
Our server delivers a daily accounting of reviews, readings, poems, letters and articles that receive the most hits. We also get an accounting of gross totals --- total number of viewings of any and all our files.
RALPH, we find, to our amazement, now gets ten- to twenty-thousand hits a day. Pure page hits amount to over 350,000 a month.***
Typical Daily Editorial Meeting |
There are a variety of reasons for a particular item's popularity. A few seem to create interest because of the colorful attention-getting photographs attached to the review. Thus, Paul Krassner's book on Toad-Slime may make the grade not only because he is a funny writer, but because of the poignant shots of amphibians we came up with to add pizzazz to the review.
Our Director of
Communications |
The numbers racked up on Moko Maori Tattoo may be because of the text, or perhaps because of the heart-stopping photographs of indigenous New Zealanders with wondrous designs all over their faces.Others may make the grade for less seemly reasons. Our longest-running hit article has to do with the trial of Fatty Arbuckle, showing that Hollywood scandal may attract not only endless but eternal curiosity.
Our Chief of Protocol |
And files of ours up at Google with the word "Sex" or "Erotic" or "Nude" (or, in one case, "Onan") in the title always attract inordinate --- and perhaps naïve --- interest.At the top of the bare bums list is Nude Sculpture: The Last 5,000 Years --- a respectable volume from the very respectable publishing firm of Harry N. Abrams.
Our Editor, Lolita Lark |
There is, too, the bitter, funny prison poem, "Song to Onan's Complaining Hand" by 19th-century Dominican Republic poet, Manuel del Cabral.And a "Letter to the Editor" that continues to excite prurient interest is the one explaining to those looking for RALPH that they may be being waylaid by yet another RALPH --- an excessively noisy beer-and-bust-fondle mag out of the wilds of Australia ... partially owned by, of all people, Bill Gates.
Our Staff Physician |
Outside of these exceptions, we figure that most of the reviews, readings, articles, and poems are on the hit list because they are strange, honest, or caustic enough to attract attention from those who have grown tired of the puff-piece world of American book reviewing. Our Public Relations Director |
RALPH, the friendly Australian Fondle magazine, probably picks up a thousand times more hits per moment than RALPH --- The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities. But we like to think that there will always be a place for an on-line magazine that explores the frontiers of ideas with the same enthusiasm as our more provocative peer to the south explores the frontiers of lubricity.
*** This works out to
8,212,500 hits a year,
or, possibly,
93,000,000,000 a century.
Go here to see
the list of our 10
Most Popular Titles,
or here for the 20
Runners-Up.