Inside Magazines: Independent Pop Culture Magazines

Citation

James, S. (2002), "Inside Magazines: Independent Pop Culture Magazines", Library Review, Vol. 51 No. 9, pp. 485-486. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2002.51.9.485.10

You will not find any of these in your local newsagent, nor in the usual magazine mass outlets: while some way short of being the magazine world’s equivalent to the artist’s book, these “pop culture” magazines sit in a niche between underground and mass‐market magazines. They probably also sit in a temporal sense between the printed and the electronic or Web site magazine. There is an obvious groundswell of creativity underneath these productions and this book is very welcome, both to introduce the genre to a wider audience (if that is not self‐defeating of the original magazines’ purpose) and to record some major examples. Quite apart from their intrinsic interest and attraction, the titles displayed here suggest creative and visual ideas that can usefully – or do already – impinge on other areas.

I cannot claim to know enough about the source material to say how comprehensive or widespread is the selection of titles, or whether the lack of any examples from the UK has any significance, for the genre itself or for this book. But there seems a good range of examples from the USA, Canada, Japan and the Netherlands, in each case with a brief introduction to the title followed by reproductions of sample pages.

The second half of the book features essays, visual projects, sample pages created especially for this publication, and interviews with various creators of the magazines. It is always interesting – and often great fun – to take a completely different look at something thought familiar, and these magazines, as well as this book recording them, do just that. Here is a fascinating snapshot of a publishing phenomenon worth recording for its own sake, as well as for the ideas it might provoke in a wider graphical context.