Benjamin Martin was an itinerant lecturer, instrument maker, and the author of a substantial number of textbooks mainly in the sciences. His biggest project, however, was The General Magazine of Arts and Sciences (1755–64), dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge to a broad audience. Rather than study Martin's works with regard to the history of science, this article examines his publications in terms of their highly self‐conscious engagement with form and format. While his textbooks are concerned with economic compression, his periodical General Magazine experiments with a special, unwieldy mode of seriality that brings to the fore the role of format as well as the precarious status of seriality for the purposes of knowledge dissemination.