Although it is well established that little magazines have constituted communities of readers in African print cultures (see work by Barber, Mokoena, Newell, Hofmeyr, Sandwith, Lindfors and others), a theoretically cogent account of the journal as form remains largely to be done. Ephemeral and often limited in their geographical reach, journals have nonetheless functioned as crucial literary nodes, connecting worlds that were otherwise separate. Indeed, this scrambling of the distant and proximate might be seen as the form’s main appeal. What requires closer attention, however, is the different kinds of worlds that they connect (or fail to connect). Postcolonial reading will typically privilege the spatial dimension, but it is equally important to consider how cultural, social, linguistic and aesthetic worlds intersect through the journal form. Inspired by Eric Hayot’s discussion of aesthetic worlds, I will argue that the collage-like structure of little magazines constitute distinct and variable forms of “worldedness”. By juxtaposing different media, genres and modes of address, they present both deliberate and accidental world-constructions whose inclusions must always be read in relation to their exclusions. From that theoretical point of departure, which avoids frontloading the nation as the determining context – but works rather with entities both smaller and larger than the nation – it then becomes possible to produce more form-sensitive readings, grounded in the materiality of the journal as object. In the southern African context, where print-bound public spheres have been fragmented and precarious (and funded by divergent interests, both domestic and international), this mode of reading promises to bring out wider implications of the literary journal as “literature in the making”. The paper has a historical focus and will be drawing examples from The Purple Renoster, The Classic and Staffrider.