Modernist writers and many of their rhetorical opponents could agree on one aspect of early twentieth-century British print culture: the sense that literary evaluation was in crisis, that there was no guarantee that works of aesthetic quality were being identified and rewarded by critics or the marketplace, and thus that works of the first order were in danger of sinking into obscurity. Explanations of this crisis varied widely, with blame falling alternately on the increased number of books produced, the explosion of the periodicals market and resulting fragmentation of the public sphere, the new machinery of literary publicity and celebrity, the retrograde tastes of established, bourgeois critics (for modernists), or modernism itself, which became a sensation before critical protocols had emerged to explain and evaluate its productions. This crisis constituted an opportunity for scores of new literary periodicals launched in the early twentieth century; they seldom passed up the opportunity to posit themselves as, at their most modest, guides to readers in a crowded book market or, more stridently, beacons of light in the darkness of a print culture gone wrong. Modernist versions of this self-positioning are familiar: Scrutiny's assertion that ‘the age is illiterate with periodicals’; Eliot's implication that the Criterion would partake in ‘the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste’; the Little Review's resolve to brook ‘no compromise with the public taste’. Less well-known today, but for some years closer to the centre of literary values in England as well as more widely read, was the London Mercury. A monthly literary review edited by Georgian poet and celebrated parodist J. C. Squire, the journal is best known today for rejecting modernism, most memorably in Squire's trenchant slating of The Waste Land – best known, that is, for ending up on the wrong side of literary history.