As often happens when I'm away from home, the flat has been "tidied" by my fellow incumbent.

This urge to rearrange books or re-file journals usually occurs in the midnight hour. Once, dreading me returning the next morning to discover the living room swamped by a tsunami of books from a massive bookcase he was relocating, he was up until dawn getting everything back into place. I must admit, the room looked a whole lot better when I got home, even if he didn't.

The latest blitz on the premises was relatively tame. Several square feet of carpet remained available for walking, so long as one was able to leap between them, in the process clearing the towers of books and box files that separated them. No problem for Jessica Ennis, less easy for me.

Yet as always, his excavations threw up some long-lost gems. So it was I found myself absorbed in an issue of the New Edinburgh Review, from winter 1978. Edited by James Campbell, now a stalwart of the TLS, every page was interesting. From short stories by George Mackay Brown and Ron Butlin, poems by Brian McCabe, Charles Tomlinson and Douglas Dunn (Subterranean Piss Parlour, Glasgow), to intellectual and lucid articles by the likes of the late, lamented Angus Calder (on African literature) and James Young (kailyard history), it was a small feast.

Scotland once had a proud tradition of well-funded literary magazines. Despite the death of several, many continue to limp on, Edinburgh Review, Gutter, The Dark Horse, Chapman and Northwards Now among them, while new titles regularly appear. The survival of all these, dependent as they are on dwindling state support, is precarious to say the least.

It's not the appetite for them that's died but the funding. Living as I do with the editor of the Scottish Review of Books, this is a common topic of conversation. In fact, please consider this column a plea for a zillionaire to step into the breach and back a Scottish literary journal of his or her choice.

Even those bankrolled by the rich, however, can find themselves toiling. The London Review of Books, edited by Mary-Kay Wilmers, is famously in debt to her family trust to the tune, according to the latest figures, of tens of millions a year. More recently, the Tetra Pak heiress Sigrid Rausing, owner of Granta magazine and its book publishing wing, has also been feeling the pinch. Partly because of proposed cutbacks, in the past few weeks Granta has seen a slew of senior staff resign. Among them is the magazine's editor John Freeman, an occasional reviewer on these pages, and his deputy. The art director and associate editor are also leaving, and other departures are in the pipeline. As one insider is quoted as saying, it's a "complete bloody disaster".

Rausing has said her reasons are financial, hence closing their New York office and the art department, and merging the position of magazine editor with the commissioning editor for Granta and Portobello Books into the single post of editor-in-chief. As she commented, "The magazine I don't think will ever be profitable, but I am certainly hoping that the book side will make money."

In this climate economising is hardly unusual in publishing or literary magazines. Nor can one criticise Rausing for trying to plug the drain. No matter how well-off one is, losing money by the fistful makes little sense. Nor does running an outfit entirely on debt. For canny retrenchment, one need look no further than last year's short-lived Arts Journal, which survived for a mere two issues before its wealthy backer decided enough was enough.

As the crisply functional black and white edition of the New Edinburgh Review showed, a literary magazine need not be luxuriously glossy or flash to do its job well. A clear layout, good writing and informed opinion is what's required. That, and a philanthropist prepared to dig deep in their pockets. Then again, they used to ask, "How does a billionaire become a millionaire? By buying a football club." That could now be rewritten, replacing the football club with a literary magazine.