We were participating on an interesting panel about whether professional magazines deserve Hugo Awards at the 2009 Worldcon in Montreal, Canada, when Gardner Dozois brought up the very Wittgensteinian question: “What is a magazine?” Although not obviously esoteric, this question once precipitated a minor dispute between Asimov’s and the US Post Office. In the early eighties, the USPS suddenly informed us that Asimov’s was not a magazine, and thus not eligible for the cheaper second-class postage rates. They thought we might actually be a series of anthologies disguised as a periodical. Our publisher asked the editor, Shawna McCarthy, to write a defense for Asimov’s that would prove it really was a magazine.

The Post Office seemed to be contending that since we didn’t have pictures of swimsuit models, short pithy news items, and ads for automobiles and makeup, and since we were filled with works of fiction, we couldn’t be a “magazine.” Second-class postage was renamed periodical postage in 1996, but the rules still state “material that has been, or is intended to be, distributed primarily as a book may not be converted into an issue of a periodical by merely placing a periodical’s title on it, placing the material within a periodical’s cover, or using similar superficial methods.” Taking a seemingly obvious route, Shawna saved the day by pointing out that in addition to fiction, we had an editorial, a letters column, a book review and a small number of classified and display ads. We might not look like People, Newsweek, or Sports Illustrated, but, somehow, we still fit within the Platonic ideal of what constitutes a magazine. Indeed, despite the USPS’s insistence on a diversity of material, there have been magazines like Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, which, before its redesign in the early eighties, published only stories and hadn’t any nonfiction columns.

It’s probably just as well that neither Shawna nor the USPS resorted to the Oxford English Dictionary to resolve this conundrum. The word “magazine” can trace its root to “makhazin,” the plural of the Arabic word for storehouse. After wading through fifteen hundred words to reach definition 5. a., we discover that the first recorded use of the word in a figurative sense similar to the way we use it today was in fact a reference to a book as “a storehouse of information on a specified subject or for a particular class of persons.” It’s not until 1731, a hundred years later, that we find the word used in the modern sense of definition 5. b. “A periodical publication containing articles by various writers; chiefly, [one] intended for general rather than learned or professional readers, and consisting of a miscellany of critical and descriptive articles, essays, works of fiction, etc.”

For its own purposes, the Post Office further insists that “periodical publications must be formed of printed sheets.” Older regulations specified that these sheets were made out of paper, but they can now be “paper, cellophane, foil, or other similar materials.” While we don’t go in for cellophane or foil, we here at the magazinary* tend to think of a magazine as a paper product. Indeed, even the online dictionary.com says that a magazine is “usually bound in a paper cover.”

Nowadays, though, most people would agree that a definition of “magazine” that limited the word to mean a paper artifact would be much too narrow. Although we’ve coined terms like “e-zine” and “webzine” to refer to certain electronic entities that exist in cyperspace, it’s clear that these sites share many of the same figurative aspects of a storehouse that magazines do. In addition to fiction, sites like Clarkesworld and the now defunct Baen’s Universe have had beautiful covers and thoughtful editorials. Strange Horizons has poems, insightful book reviews, and nonfiction articles. Although Asimov’s has a web presence, we don’t exist online as an “e-zine” or a “magazine.” On the other hand, we are available from Fictionwise, the eBook retailer, and on Amazon’s Kindle in a downloadable electronic format, and we expect to be offered at other electronic venues soon. The number of subscribers to our print edition is almost exactly the same as last year, but we’ve seen explosive growth in electronic subscriptions. More than 10 percent of you now take delivery of the magazine as an electronic download.

The Worldcon panel didn’t resolve the question of whether the Hugo Award for professional magazine should be reinstated any better than this editorial establishes a rigid definition for “magazine.” The twentieth century philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, looked at the equally thorny concept of “game” in his groundbreaking work, Philosophical Investigations. That term can refer to such diverse activities as football and solitaire as well as chess, ring-around-the-roses, and Call of Duty. After discussing a number of different games, Wittgenstein said, “the result of the examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.” Rather than look for the one thing these activities all had in common, he wrote, “I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances.’ ”

From the early Hitchcock to People, and from Newsweek to Strange Horizons, we’re quite happy to continue having fun on the playing field with the rest of our kin. We’ll do so in both our print and electronic editions, and in other distribution formats now in existence or hereafter known or devised.

*A word I learned while perusing the OED with my magnifying glass. Wags at the office allowed that the term made sense since our place is so much like a cannery or a brewery—not.