At some point Wet Asphalt will begin to assemble a definitive list of fiction and poetry journals that charge reading fees. The charging of reading fees is the odious practice by which publishers of literature seek to pass on their operating costs to the people who generate the content they are selling. This is idiotic.
Today on choriamb, I learned that there are actually presses that charge reading fees for manuscripts.
These are people who publish books of poetry and sell them. The revenue generated by such publishers is traditionally made through the profits on such sales. This money is then split up between the publisher, the author, and the author's representatives. Does anybody else think it's surreally stupid to reverse the flow of capital? These are companies that are charging the producer of a product for the privelege they are granting her of possibly allowing the company to make money off her work. Now, I'm no Marxist, but this is such a gross failure of freemarket capitalism I'm set to start flying my red flag any minute.
A partial list of these publishers taken from choriamb and poetryhut.com: