The STACK Blog
Printout – one week on
Thursday, November 10th, 2011
I can’t believe it’s been a week already. Just a quick one then to say thanks very much to Les, Cathy and Gareth (there they are above being interviewed by a blurry Jeremy). And thanks also to everyone who came over to talk or left their feedback on the blog – we want to make Printout the best independent magazine night bar none, so it’s brilliant to know what you all think about it.
We don’t have a date in the diary yet, but the aim is to run the next Printout in January, so I hope you’ll come along to that and see your feedback being put into practice.
Thanks also to Gus at The Church of London for taking pictures for us – I’ll stick a couple of them below.
Independence and Fire & Knives get a good thumbing
Address in the process of being picked up
Design a Christmas card
Tuesday, November 8th, 2011
Last year lots of people bought Stack as a Christmas present – but what does a great present need? A great card to go with it.
We’re launching the Stack Christmas Card Competition to make sure that this year everyone can send their festive wishes in style. The competition is open to all illustrators, photographers, designers and anyone else who fancies having a go.
The winner will pick up £250 cash in time for their Christmas shopping, and their design will be printed up into real Christmas cards and sent out to all Stack subscribers and sold via the Stack site. Two runners-up will also receive Stack gift subscriptions to give to their loved ones (or keep for themselves).
The only rule is that the design needs to include magazines and Christmas. And it needs to look amazing.
Send your A6 design to us by Monday 28 November – please make sure the file size doesn’t exceed 2MB. We’ll pick the winner and runners up and will announce them all on the Stack blog on 1 December. We’ll also contact the winner by email. Good luck!
Knock knock, KnockBack
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011
Of all the lovely magazines sent to the Stack offices, the one that had me literally snorting with laughter was KnockBack. Written as an alternative to the vast array of women’s magazines in the shops, it’s short and snappy and is happily devoid of the kind of features that make you want to throw up: ‘How to tell if your boyfriend really loves you…. From his shoes’, ‘What every man wants in bed’, etc.
I caught up with co-founder Marie Berry to find out how KnockBack got started, what it’s like publishing an independent magazine, and where the ideas for those eye-catching covers come from.
Why did you decide to start KnockBack?
In 2005 I had a cupboard full of Word documents that were the product of isolated ranting. I thought I would publish them and did a three-day Quark course, but when Sarah Semicolon saw me clutching a handful of purple text (my printer ran out of black ink) in purple boxes, she said she would try and help. The brief I wrote her is one of the most deranged pieces of writing I’ve ever created, but somehow she translated ‘stars and magazine stuff but cool’ into the KB you see today, which most people agree looks ‘bangin’.
KnockBack is often touted as an anti-Cosmo feminist magazine. Was that always your intention?
Anti-Cosmo is accurate as we wanted to produce something more interesting, relevant to us and not a pile of shit. We started KB as a reaction to the sudden influx of magazines like She, Red, Grazia etc. The feminist label was tacked on by the Guardian and we’ve been enjoying it ever since, although our motive was entertainment before politics. We just wanted to make the point that women are funny and interesting and not obsessed with shoes and sex. With that in mind we have recently expanded our content to cover things aside from shoes and sex.
Why is a print magazine still an effective tool for getting your message across?
People enjoy the tactility of magazines, they last longer than websites (it’s harder to click away). Magazines, or ‘zines more specifically, are diverse, they are still pushing boundaries (with thanks to people like Stack). For me having a printed product represents that idea of actually doing things instead of talking about doing things or criticising other people who have done things. It’s about making things and holding them and giving them to other people. Also I don’t know any web developers, but I know a ton of printers (all called Alan, bizarrely).
What difficulties have you faced publishing without advertising?
It’s hard to say having never published anything with advertising, but for what it’s worth it’s been smashing. I have no interest in running adverts, nobody seems particularly eager to have us promote their tat and every issue so far has just about sustained itself financially. A mysterious benefactor (MB) got the ball rolling with the first issue which had a print run of 1,000 and was black and white with a two-colour cover. Our MB was sick of me talking about how shit women’s magazines were and gave me a cheque to prove I could do better. Which was nice of him. That issue asked for donations from satisfied readers, and although we never paid him back, we paid for the next issue and so on. Having said that, maybe if I sold space to adverts and ran KB like a business, the magazine would still be free and I could give up my job in marketing (there, I said it).
How has KB changed/developed from the first issue and how would you like it to develop in the future?
We don’t swear as much now, we print two colours throughout, we use spell check, our contributors stick to word counts, we let the occasional exclamation mark slip in. We don’t talk about shagging (as) incessantly and we’re more mature. Actually I think that’s the most remarkable difference, because we release issues so sporadically you get a sense of how we’ve changed from issue to issue. It’s quite clear the first one is written by angry, single 24-year-olds and the most recent by women pushing 30. In future I would like to produce an issue that doesn’t have a single typo (there are two crackers in the latest issue, first to find a third gets a badge).
I really love the covers of KB because they’re so different from any other magazine, where do the ideas for the covers come from?
The mirrored issue came from Sarah Semicolon. She said ‘I want the next issue to have a mirror for a cover, and I want the cover line to be ‘you’re so vain I bet you think this ‘zine is about you’. Then she said she’d pay for the extra cost of it so that was me sold. The deal didn’t last, nor did the line, but the mirror stuck. You can do your make up in it. After that we felt obliged to up the stakes so the Hardcore issue’s cover was chosen ‘for her pleasure’. Next up is the Media issue, which I’d like to be knitted, edible or that wallpaper you get with felt shapes on (until we have a good idea that we can afford). I like to think having beautiful covers means people treat KB a little nicer than they do most ‘zines. Nobody puts KB in the corner (I hope).
Christmas come early
Tuesday, November 1st, 2011
All this month we’re running a special offer on our gift subscriptions. Buy Stack as a gift in November and you’ll get it for £50 (normal price £58).
Once you’ve made your subscription we’ll send you an email to check whether you’d like the first magazine to go out straight away, in time for Christmas or in the New Year. And we’ll also send you a Stack gift card that you can give to your friend / family / secret Santa recipient.
The offer is only available to addresses in the UK, and it will end on 1 December. If you’ve got any questions just drop us a line and we’ll get back to you straight away.
Quick flick – Ampersand
Monday, October 31st, 2011
Ampersand reminds me why magazines will always have a place on my increasingly packed shelf. It is a magazine that commands you to take time and savour it. A typeset order to turn each page, read the words slowly, admire the illustrations, pause at the photography, and miss your next tube stop as a result.
Started in 2009 by Alice Gage, Ampersand was born from her desire to lift the bar of Australian magazine publishing. As she explains in this interview, “I didn’t think Australians were taking enough risks in magazines, it seemed everyone was just towing the line. It had gotten so bad that readers had forgotten what a good magazine could be. I also wanted to do something useful with my brain before it turned to gazpacho and I carked it.” Thankfully for us, the art publishing powerhouse Art&Australia magazine have picked up Ampersand and will help Gage publish another edition in 2011.
Issue four, the first Ampersand to make it into the world as an official quarterly magazine put together in three months, explores themes of remoteness. It dwells upon the outskirts of Australia, the highways, silences and borderlands of urban sprawl and life at the edge of the world. The writing is sharp and funny and the design is wonderfully clean.
It’s the kind of magazine that inspires people to create timelapse videos and twelve-letter acronyms about. ‘Nuff said really.
One week to go
Thursday, October 27th, 2011
The next Printout is now just a week away and the magazine library is looking bigger than ever. We’ve got magazines arriving every day, but the following list should give you a decent idea of what to expect.
And of course we’ve got a panel discussion on labours of love, music from Oh Comely and a free copy of Patterns of Creative Aggression for everyone. Tickets are only £5 – see you there.
.Cent
8 Magazine
Anorak
Arc
Art of Eating
Article
Biopsy
Boat
Bonafide
Boneshaker
Bracket
Brownbook
Capsule
Cosplay Gen
Decat O Revista
Delayed Gratification
Der Grief
Design Beaureau
Die Nacht
Eat Me
Elsie
Eye
FAQNP
Fire & Knives
Flamingo
Garageland
Gopher Illustrated
Grafik
Gym Class
Homesapiens
Huck
Idiographic
IdN
Inventory
It’s Nice That
Karen
Kasino Creative Annual
KillScreen
Kilimanjaro
Knockback
Laphams Quarterly
Little White Lies
Lost in London
Manzine
Meatpaper
Mono Kultur
No Zine
Notion
O Comely
Or Something
Otaku
Out of Step
Oxford American
Patterns of Creative Aggression
<Plog>
Poor but Sexy
Popshot
Privateer
Remedy
Rouleur
Shellsuit Zombie
Shook
Shopping Hour
Snap
Sup
Teller
The Weekender
The White Review
The Wire
Tough Crowd
Turps Banana
VNA
Wooden Toy
Worn
Wrap
Linefeed Reading List
Friday, October 21st, 2011The new Linefeed Reading List is out now, featuring Fire & Knives delivered by Stack. Also included this time around are Wooooo, Little White Lies, Popshot, L’Officiel, L’Officiel Hommes, Fricote, SID magazine, Parq, Aspekt Ratio and Fact. It’s a feast of magazine flicking, all presented in Michael’s signature style of informed, relaxed chat. I like it a lot.
Quick Flick – Popshot
Tuesday, October 18th, 2011
This week at Stack has seen a whole load of beautiful magazines landing on our desks in preparation for the next Printout event on 3 November. Currently top of my pile is Popshot, a bi-annual British magazine that champions contemporary poetry and illustration. They like their themes at Popshot and this issue is dedicated to love, but as you can guess from Kate Copeland’s cover illustration, it’s not all love hearts and snuggles.
Editor Jacob Denno has done an excellent job of collating love poems that hold contemporary relevance and aren’t wrapped up in the more clichéd formats we tend to anticipate from poetry anthologies (especially when it comes to the theme of love). ‘Allow Yourself This One Day’ by Max Wallis is a nostalgic view on the stifled idleness you feel the day after a break up, “hungover from love. To sit in your sad cocoon.” The accompanying illustration of a couple entwined inside an hour-glass perfectly complements Wallis’ melancholy prose.
This issue has an interview with Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine and one of the eight poets chosen for the Faber New Poets Scheme. Each poem is followed by a short blurb about the writer’s inspiration, which can be enlightening at times but can also spoil the mystery and subjectivity of the poem.
