When he was a boy, Peter Money kept a little toy safe in which he stored both the shiny things that a 7-year-old might value and his first poems.

Since then, Money has been repeating that pattern, putting literature into bound journals, a more adult safe place for writing.

"There must be something of value in keeping a collection of words, keeping them safe so that they don't diminish, at least by inattention," Money said in a recent interview.

After starting literary journals in college and teaching writing in California, Money has started Across Borders, an annual international literary journal based at Lebanon College, where Money coordinates the department of writing and literature.

The 42-year-old West Windsor, Vt., resident hopes Across Borders will bring some recognition to Lebanon College and give the Upper Valley a repository for writing at once local and global in scope. "Every community," he said, holding up a copy of Across Borders, "ought to have the life raft, the body of a text of a book to suggest that there's more than rhetoric."

The second issue of Across Borders came out at the end of the summer. It includes work from students and faculty at Dartmouth and at the Center for Cartoon Studies as well as a piece of an unpublished "visual novel" by Philippe Tapon, photographs by Ted Degener and poems by Iraqi exile Saadi Yousef.

It costs about $2,500 to produce an issue. Across Borders is released as a bound paperback with only 200 copies of each issue reaching Upper Valley bookstores and subscribers. Contributors are paid with two copies each. Money has chosen to produce fewer copies of a higher-quality printing than to cut costs by, for example, grouping all of the photographs at the center of each volume or using a lower quality paper stock. The current issue costs $10.

So far, Money has secured all of the funding for the journal, both from donors and from a family foundation controlled by the family of his wife, Lucinda Walker.

"I guess I don't expect funding from the college because in part that allows us to be more forthcoming," Money said. "Even though I don't think the college would ever object (to the journal's content), it allows literature to be literature."

Literary journals often have colleges as sponsors. The New England Review, founded in the Upper Valley, is now under the wing of Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vt., for example. Absent such a sponsor, such a journal is often a labor of love.

"There's a kind of bumblebee quality to it," said Jim Schley, who co-edited New England Review with its founder, Sydney Lea. "The engineers would say that it can't fly," but it does, said Schley, who now directs The Frost Place, a poetry center at Robert Frost's former home in Franconia.

Although it has never been easier to produce a literary journal, thanks to desktop publishing software, it faces some persistent challenges, Schley said. "The big debate . . . these days is, 'Why print at all?' " Many journals exist only on the Internet, where they can reach a global audience with no printing costs.

And it can be hard to get a distracted public to notice something new in print, "but it's not impossible," Schley said.

Money is producing Across Borders because he loves literature and Lebanon College, which he discovered while still living in California.

He studied literature at Oberlin, graduating in 1986, and for a semester in Dublin, Ireland. At Oberlin he founded Writers' Bloc, a literary journal, and after college helped create Lame Duck, a journal with a title born out of frustration with the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

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