You’d think with the digital age and everything that magazines would be dying out like the dinosaurs. but many of us are still here, busting our nuts to create a magazine that makes kids wanna spend ten bucks to own. you’d think with so many titles, there’d never be room for a new mag, but new ideas are hard to repress and even harder to instigate, so if there are innovators out there, good luck to you, whoever you are.
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Woody W
Sneaker Freaker magazine
Our magazine is built on blood, sweat and tears. If we weren’t totally committed and prepared to make sacrifices, it wouldn’t exist.
–
Matthew Bochenski
Little White Lies magazine
A magazine happens because someone, somewhere needs it to exist. They need the medium of a magazine to help them capture a feeling, distill a sensation, bottle an attitude. They want to reach out and touch it, to explore its texture, its taste, they want to turn it upside down and inside out, they want to see it close up and from far away, and to let it fan the flames of their passions ever higher. And they want more than anything to share this experience with as many people as possible, both people who already think like they do and others who may be ready to make the switch. Someone, somewhere is reaching out to you through their magazine, and they keep doing it, again and again and again, every time a new issue comes out.
Is it a form of madness, this act of trying to hold the snowflake, to swallow the rainbow, to force lightening onto paper? Is it a pointless activity, to strive to make the perfect magazine, and then have to keep doing it from the beginning each and every issue, however close they got the last time?
Madness, genius or both, there is something about magazines that has people like me hooked. At its height, it is the perfect marriage of an old medium (text) and a more modern one (graphic design), a truly popular and often populist way of sharing images, ideas and information. In its most successful forms, a magazine is both ephemeral and long lasting, invoking both familiarity and surprise in every edition. A magazine is a never-ending story. For millions of people, reading them is a pleasure; for the people mentioned inside these pages, making them is a drug.
Putting together this book has been an incredible journey around the world, surrounded by the creative energy of hundreds of people who put their passion and talent into publishing outside their country’s mainstream (while doubtless informing and inspiring it). We – that is, designer Jeremy Leslie, publisher Mike Koedinger and myself – started out by making a personal selection, one that we felt reflected some of the essentials of the independent magazine world as it stands in 2009. Some of those magazines that we chose asked not to be included, and we respected their wishes. others didn’t get back to us in time, and we reluctantly removed them too. Still more magazines, doubtless thousands more, haven’t yet crossed our path, which may explain their omission. This is not a complete list of anything, not even of our favorite magazines.
What it is, however, is a representation of why and how independent magazines continue to lead the way, showing the mainstream media how to innovate and excite through their variety, originality, tenacity, thoughtfulness, creativity, inspiration, individuality, defiance. Beauty. Truth. Ugliness. Fiction.
We couldn’t have made this book without the incredible generosity and patience of all of the magazines found within. In most cases, we only included small excerpts from their answers to the questionnaires we sent out; the full interviews can be found online at www.colophon2009.com/archive
This book is, admittedly, a frustrating read – you instantly want to dive into the pages and pick these magazines up, to flick through their pages, feel their weight, smell their ink, to read them page by page. Instead, read this book as a travel guide, filled with dizzying tales of beautiful sunsets, adrenalin-filled climbs, dense forests and endless beaches. Make note of the places you want to visit. Then track them down.
Or read this book for inspiration. Enjoy the stories, listen to the advice, revel in the brief glimpses of the wizards behind the curtain.
Or read this book as a souvenir brought back from the creative underground at the beginning of 2009, a hinterland beyond the reach of the mainstream, where dragons lurk and ingenuity blooms.
Read this book. And keep reading magazines.
–
Andrew Losowsky,
Rhode Island, USA
What is the secret of our success? Humanity and community, trust in ideals, absence of fear to break rules and even laws, love of life and people, curiosity, an eager desire for non-stop revolution, a strict intention to change the world, a forever-young feeling of flying, a flexibility to circumstances combined with stable principles, a readiness to be open and to accept everything, to lose, to fail, to recover, to be happy.
–
Alena Boika
Umelec magazine