The exchanges of letters between John Murray and his gentlemen beginning in 1807 offer a revealing look behind the scenes of the Quarterly Review. Jonathan Cutmore's unpublished edition of these letters gives us a greatly enlarged impression of what Murray, Walter Scott (not yet Sir Walter Scott) and George Ellis thought they were doing as they worked in secrecy to found the Quarterly in opposition to the Edinburgh Review and enlist William Gifford as editor. I will be concentrating here on the letters written prior to the first issue of the Quarterly that discuss the founders' elaborate plans for the new periodical. Our new insight into the specificities of these plans deepens our understanding of the material conditions underlying Romantic-era print culture. Mixed in with references to other business matters, we can also find in the letters plenty of eye-opening general reflections about what these so-called ‘Tory conspirators’ hoped to achieve. As Cutmore shows in his essay in the present volume, re-examining the formation of the Quarterly helps to challenge the myth of its ideological cohesiveness. In my essay, I will be looking both at freshly available and previously published letters to bring out the creative impulses behind this high-stakes enterprise. I have raised elsewhere the question of what it would mean for Romantic-era periodicals to be termed Romantic in the traditional aesthetic sense. Many scholars have long considered the politically conservative Quarterly anti-Romantic because of its intemperate attacks on Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt. However, certain articles in the Quarterly can be seen as contributing to even while they resist the emergence of canonical Romanticism – not so much in what they say as in how they say it. By contrast, the letters dealing with the founding of the Quarterly at first sight exemplify the nitty-gritty machinations behind the invention of a new product in the literary marketplace, appearing completely at odds with Romantic notions such as spontaneity, beauty and the ‘deep self’.