The Gentlewoman, mini-edition
One of the great strengths of The Gentlewoman is the clear sense of identity and purpose applied to everything the team produces. Our latest page 23 comes from their latest addition, a mini magazine to mark their 20th edition/tenth anniversary.
The mini mag weighs in at a tidy 60 x 81mm, and reproduces each of the 20 cover story interviews to date in 584 pages – from Adele to Zadie, as they put it. It’s a clever repurposing of the long-form features, and reinforces the role of their biannual cover star in defining the magazine. The cover repeats their latest Margaret Atwood design in miniature, but otherwise each page has been rebuilt to suit the new format.
It’s fascinating to compare the same material presented in different formats; page 23 of the mini version fall in the middle of the Atwood interview and recounts the start of her career as a novelist. The text is a single column, narrower than the columns in the regular version – it suits Atwood particularly as it looks like a miniature book layout – and the typeface remains the same, with a typically concise use of page furniture.
Searching for the same part of the text in the regular magazine, it turned up about a quarter of the way down the first column on page 203. Too much of a coincidence, I couldn’t resist the coming together of so many twos and threes.
More importantly, The Gentlewoman mini magazine is a great example of re-using existing material. Resisting the temptation to republish the interviews until an appropriate moment, like Fantastic Man’s ‘What Men Wear’ publication, it adds to the story of the core magazine rather than distracting or even detracting from it.
Editor-in-chief: Penny Martin
Creative director: Veronica Ditting