Hard choices

Esquire UK has announced that its September edition (available from tomorrow, apparently) is in the format of a hardback book. Eye‘s blog has managed to sneak a peek, and it looks rather nice.

The timing isn’t coincidental, of course – this is Esquire‘s “Suit Issue”, coinciding with fashion week and the highpoint of the magazine advertising year (even in a valley of troughs, the month with a peak is a mountain).

It’s a bold move for a big newsstand title – and, as with most newsstand innovations, it’s been done many times before.

As a ‘one-off’, a far bolder design of hardback was most recently the format of choice for British cult literary magazine The Idler, whose musty-styled book “Smash the System” contrasted rather wonderfully with the newsstand around it. Graffiti art magazine PIMP has also dabbled with the cardboard cover for its recent issue 12, Evolving Styles.

Others have either started or turned hard more permanently – the print element of magazine/DVD publication Specialten turned hardback three issues ago, and shows no sign of stopping; in the mid 1990s, a sci-fi/fantasy magazine called Pulphouse lasted for 12 issues of hardback existence; new funky food magazine Swallow is a hardback that reminds me of the kinds of magazine-themed annuals I’d get at Christmas (which partly explains why it’s so expensive), while biannual photography magazine C is almost as much of a solid wrist-breaker as hardback French fashion biannual Self Service. And of course, not forgetting the shortlived hardback magazine designed by Herb Lubalin, Eros, an old Magtastic favourite about which I performed a hyperactive Pecha Kucha at Colophon2009.

In some ways, hardback is a more natural fit for literary magazines – indie fave McSweeney’s often subverts the format while also following many of its conventions, and while not a hardback, Granta has always taken the format of book/magazine hybrid. Which perhaps brings us closest to understand what a hardback format brings to a magazine.

Once a magazine is hardback, it becomes much closer to being a book – and a traditional western education instills an almost-holy respect for books. Whereas people will tear an article out of a magazine without a thought, tearing a book is somehow sacrilegious – even though they have paid for the book, and may not want to keep it. Similarly, throwing away a book, no matter how badly written or offensive, is a societal no-no. You can’t even put it into a recycling bin – the only kind of recycling that’s somehow permitted is donating it a goodwill/charity shop or a secondhand bookshop.

So, if you turn your magazine into a book, you are suddenly making it into a morally more complex object, one that sits more easily on your readers’ shelves, but weighs more heavily on their conscience. It transforms the content from transient ephemera to more weighty, long-lasting reference material, sitting on people’s shelves to be seen and analysed by party guests. C claims their magazine is akin to “an encyclopaedia of photography”, and it’s not hard to see why – the format doesn’t just permit such an interpretation, it actively encourages it.

I’m very much looking forward to the Esquire hardback, which apparently is only available in the south-east of England (a money-saving trick pulled by Natmags before – plus subscribers don’t get it, no matter where they live), which I’m sure will sell very well indeed this month, as it offers something unexpected and pleasingly weighty on the newsstand, for just £4.25.

However, I fervently hope that they’ve done more as a concession to the format than just add fancy endpaper pages with their logo. I want something more useful and less ephemeral than Esquire‘s normal content in its design and editorial, a publication that closer matches the physical attributes and longevity of the object itself – otherwise, all the gimmick will achieve, in the medium to long term, is a tricky moral decision over how to get rid of it.