The Happy Hypocrite is a biannual journal focusing on experimental writing. Informed by a lineage of such modern avant-garde magazines as Bananas, Documents, The Fox, Merlin and Tracks, The Happy Hypocrite aspires to unpack the methodology of such key journals while providing a new approach to art writing. It provides a testing ground for new writing and research-based projects, acting as a place for artists, writers and theorists to express experimental ideas that might not otherwise be realized or published.

In this issue, editor Mario Fusco presents a complete reprinting of A Great Book Primer: Essays on Liberal Education, the Uses of Reading and the Rules of Reading, first published by the Great Books Foundation, Chicago in 1955. The primer is divided into three parts: “Liberal Education”, with essays establishing the centrality of enlightenment thinking and the moral virtue of education and tradition. In part two, “The Uses of Discussion”, a range of essays affirms the use of these moral virtues and traditions through the art of educated conversation. Finally, part three consists of an essay elaborating a set of rules for reading well, and the art of discussion, and of course their intimate and sympathetic relationship to the art of thinking well – “boldly, critically and freely.” With contributions ranging from Francis Bacon and Samuel Johnson to T.S. Eliot and Michel de Montaigne, and seemingly useless when divorced from the complete series of Great Books, this primer exists as both an archaic set of rules, and open-ended set of possibilities.