Making Magazines

The Princeton Architectural Press have just published 'Making Magazines', a transcription of the 'Fresh Dialogues – Making Magazines' event held last June in New York. The editors of independent magazines Bidoun, Esopus and Topic discuss the origins of their publications with magazine guru James Truman, and take questions from him and the audience. The whole thing is faithfully noted out along with script-like notations ('audience laughter'), and while the text is pretty brief the book is filled out with plenty of example pages and covers from the three magazines.

While the images and texts aren't really linked in any way other than their shared origins, they work well together at communicating the character of each publication. You get a good feel for the magazines, and while the three editor/publishers don't explicitly address the issue anyone thinking of launching their own magazine will learn a lot. (It's the familiar issues of funding and distribution that exercise them most).

Plenty of good insight to making your own magazines and some cute observations of the differences between independent and mainstream publishing, teased out by ex-Conde Nast man Truman. The three editors are linked by their love for The New Yorker and dislike of Newsweek.