Photos can’t do justice to the second (sorry, deuxième) issue of Vintage magazine. It’s an elegant box of surprises, bound together in a single volume.
You are currently browsing the archive for the Review category.
When I was in Bulgaria earlier this year, a lovely and talented fellow came up to me and gave me a copy of a zine that he made in 2004.
Ƨnob. is a curious magazine.
First, the name isn’t quite what you think it is. Just as “yuppie” meant “young urban/upwardly mobile professional”, the word ‘snob’ in Russian is actually an acronym for “accomplished, independent, educated and thriving” (at least according to the WSJ).
Aimed at a growing Russian wealthy middle class, what’s perhaps most unusual of all is that although Ƨnob is purely in Russian only, it is also distributed in London and in certain parts of the USA. They’ve bought up expensive billboards on the Tube and full-page ads in magazines such as The New Yorker with the tagline “Ask a Russian friend to read it to you.”
A pile of magazines is again building up. The fight goes on, regardless, to review, to compile, to process, to share.
Today, it’s the turn of a selection of four unusual magazines, all published in a language that I don’t understand. This means that I can’t tell you how well they’re written or how successfully they match image and design to narrative. They all, however, contain plenty for the linguistically challenged to enjoy.
First up, the third issue of Der Wedding. I mentioned this magazine a while back, without actually having seen a copy.
Now that I have, I still think that it is, as far as I can gather, a bit like Karen in that it shares tales of everyday people and places, in this case however all from within one of the poorest areas of Berlin (called Der Wedding).
(Image: an Indigo digital printing press by HP)
The last ten years or so has been a remarkable time for personal publishing. The rise of online is very well documented; however, we’ve also seen a huge reduction in the barriers to entry for self-publishing in print.
Desktop publishing software has become affordable (or even free), print-on-demand suppliers such as Lulu and MagCloud now remove much of the financial risk of short-run creations, and The Newspaper Club has made newsprint available to everyone. All you need is some design knowhow, and some words.
Ten Things is a collection of magazines, thoughts and ephemera that have been sitting on my desk for a few months while I caught up with deadlines. And apologies about the quality of the photos in this entry.
Dodgem Logic is best described as the brain of Alan Moore as nailed onto a sheet of paper and buried at midnight until it’s ripe. And it’s (mostly) great.
Contact me
Stranded magazine
My books
Stack America
The Colophon biennale
