Tulane Drama Review

This publication has quite a history. Here are its various names:

• The Carleton Drama Bulletin (1949-1954)

• The Carleton Drama Review (1955/1956)

• The Tulane Drama Review (1957-1967)

• TDR (1967-1968)

• The Drama Review: TDR (1968-1987)

• TDR (1988-2015)

I'm concerned only with the years as the Tulane Drama Review, as those quarterly issues were distributed by Hill & Wang as a quasi-Dramabook. The titles were advertised by H&W alongside the Dramabooks line and were sometimes described as part of the imprint, although they were entirely the creation of Tulane University's Department of Theatre.

An ad in PW, Jan. 26, 1959, at 64, announced that issues #1 and #2 would be distributed to bookstores by Dramabooks, with issue #1 coming out on March 17 and issue #2 in May of that year. I don't think the issue numbers that H&W used in the ad are correct, as the Spring 1959 issue, Vol. 3, No. 3, was published in March 1959 and the Summer 1959 issue, Vol. 3, No. 4, was published May 1959. These must be the first two issues distributed by H&W and are labeled T3 and T4, respectively. As a result, I've left off T1 and T2, which I can't find any evidence for anyway, strangely.

There were two distinct styles of jacket design during Hill & Wing's distribution. First, T3-T16 employ a design in which the top half of the jacket has a white background and the bottom half a single-color background, a different color for each issue. Next, starting with T17, TDR got a new, 60s-style logo design, and jacket designs got more interesting, incorporating a variety of colors and photo images.

As far as I can tell, the Tulane Drama Review was published in the same size as the Dramabooks, roughly 21cm. This size was used by the Tulane Drama Review through at least T32, based on the images I can find online, and it appears that the periodical moved to a standard magazine size format with volume 11, starting at T33. From a note in T36 (The Drama Review, TULANE DRAMA REV., Summer 1967, at 17-18), beginning with the next issue, the first of volume 12, the periodical moved its operations to New York from Tulane and became The Drama Review, sponsored by NYU with a grant from Bantam Books. Thus, although I'm having a hard time figuring if Hill & Wang's support ended before that issue (PW indicates that it was still distributed by H&W as late as Volume 9, T25, in 1964), it's the last one I'm going to list here because of the dramatic changes.