Stack Magazines

"Heritage is such an important part of place." Lindsay magazine launched earlier this year with a collection of idiosyncratic and absorbing stories from around the world. Editor and creative director Beth Wilkinson says it's often mistaken for a travel magazine, but in this conversation she explains why she wanted to present a deeper idea of culture and place that looks to history and heritage to better understand the way people live their lives now.

"We plug into a deep history of pamphleteering, troublemaking and piss taking..." Paul Gorman is co-curator of Print! Tearing It Up, the independent magazine exhibition on at Somerset House in London this summer. In this conversation, recorded live on Tuesday 31 July as part of Stack's week-long takeover, he speaks about his surprise at the current boom in independent magazines, and traces the lines of influence that have led to some of our favourite contemporary titles.

"It's important to have a little disturbance." NXS is probably the strangest magazine we've ever sent out on Stack – a brilliantly adventurous avant-garde title from Amsterdam, every part of it is designed to provoke and inspire. In this conversation, two of the team behind the magazine explain how they use the editorial structure, the typography, and even the physical shape of the pages to create a unique publication that brings together disparate ideas and individuals that would never otherwise encounter one another.

"People will give you a million hearts on Instagram, but they might not buy your magazine..." Conor Purcell has been making magazines for a long time. He's spent the last 13 years working on both corporate jobs and his own independent projects, making mistakes and learning along the way, and now he's pooled all that experience in a new book: The Magazine Blueprint. Except he hasn't only written about his own adventures – he's spoken to more than 50 editors, art directors, publishers and magazine sellers to create a comprehensive guide to independent publishing. He dropped in at Somerset House this week to speak about the making of the book, why it all takes so long to go from the idea to the finished printed object, and why he's still learning as he goes.

"I couldn't give a shit what the medium is." Jeff Taylor is the founder of Courier, the London-based magazine dedicated to covering startup culture. But as Jeff explains in the podcast below, print is not sacred to Courier's mission, and while he values it as, "an immersive, evocative but still authoritative long-form format", he is also excited about the opportunities afforded by other ways of reaching people who care about the future of business.

Independent magazines are renowned for their loveliness: the thick paper, gorgeous photography and enticing design are all there to make you want to buy a copy. But what is their own definition of beauty? And how does that compare to the sort of images we're used to seeing in mainstream editorial and advertising? Recorded live on 22 May 2018 at The Book Club in London, this panel discussion brings together the makers of Beauty Papers, Staple and Ladybeard to speak about the ideas and ideals behind their magazines.

"If art is about football it's really boring." Eddy Frankel is the editor and founder of OOF, the self-proclaimed 'art and football magazine'. But as he explains in this conversation, he's really interested in what football can tell us about the wider world, using the sport as a metaphor to explore changing ideas of society, health, corporate sponsorship and more.

"There's still a desire for long-form photo essays." Francesca Sears is Director of Special Projects at Magnum Photos, and in this episode she explains why the legendary picture agency decided to publish its first ever newspaper. Drawing upon the Magnum archives, A Brief Visual History in the Time of Isis takes a long view of history to tell a fresh story about how the group has managed to draw so much attention to itself, and challenges the image that Isis has so carefully created.

"The only thing for sale in this magazine is our ideas." Everyone knows that food magazines are supposed to be full of delicious recipes and gorgeous photography of dishes that you can either buy or make for yourself in your fantastically successful life. But Mold takes a different approach – instead of promoting aspirational images, it questions why we eat the things we do, and how that might need to change if we're going to meet the demands of feeding a rapidly expanding global population. In this episode, editor and founder LinYee Yuan explains the thinking behind her exciting, provocative magazine, and considers what the future may hold for Mold.

"Everyone has an opinion on this..." Exploring conflict and visual culture, Contra Journal wants readers to think again about the images they see everyday on the news and elsewhere. Very few people would consider themselves an expert on the subject, but almost everyone has strong feelings about it, and in this episode three of the editors discuss the ideas and motivations behind the magazine, and explain why the slowness of print is so important to the project.

"We like to go beyond the landscapes we visit." Cartography is a beautiful, photo-led travel magazine that documents not only the people and places it encounters, but also their unseen histories and "holiness". In this conversation, editor and creative director Paula Corini explains the ideas and motivation behind their uniquely spiritual approach to travel journalism.

"The process comes first and the results later." Flaneur magazine is the experimental, reflexive magazine that builds each issue around a single street. The strapline has always been 'Fragments of a street', but for the latest issue, based around Treze de Maio in São Paulo, they've intensified the fragmentation and broken their stories up into numbered chunks that flow through the pages. It's their most ambitious issue to date, and in this episode editors Grashina Gabelmann and Fabian Saul explain how they and the rest of the team made it happen.

"You come for a week and you never leave..." Slightly Foxed is the literary magazine that launched 15 years ago when three friends decided to take a stand against chain bookshops and celebrity publishing. As the magazine grew the team expanded, and in this episode they tell the story of how they became an extended family of book lovers, and why everything comes back to keeping their readers happy.

"Making a magazine is the best way to get to know a country." Froh! is a magazine and media NGO based in Cologne, and they've built a reputation for telling fascinating, unexpected stories from places like Armenia, Moldova and Lithuania. Their latest project is a book called Tbilisi – Archive of Transition, launching now on Kickstarter and based on three years spent working with locals and archives in Georgia's capital. In this episode, three of the team explain why they're drawn to these places, and why the rest of Europe could learn from them.

"I just can't think of anyone else who could do this job better than I could!" Andrew Diprose is group creative director of Wired in the UK, and in this conversation he reflects upon a career that has seen him working on iconic titles including i-D, Smash Hits and GQ, and for the last nine years Wired. He's a genuine magazine fan, and while the print publishing world has changed around him, he remains committed to the high standards that help his award-winning work to stand out from the crowd.

"Let's just make a poetry magazine – how hard can that be?" Megan Conery and Molly Taylor launched their poetry magazine hotdog in 2015, and quickly found out just how hard it could be. We delivered the third issue of hotdog to Stack subscribers last month, so Megan came over to the office to share some of the things they've learned along the way, and to talk about what drives them to keep on making the magazine bigger and better each time.

"Magazines can be more than just pieces of paper." The Party Next Door is an attempt to push beyond the established definition of what constitutes a magazine. Presented as a 12-inch vinyl record in a screenprinted sleeve, with gatefold outer sleeve, it looks to all intents and purposes like a standard record, but it's presented as issue one and its creators intend it to be a publication. Co-founder Andrew Foxall stopped in at the Stack office to give us the background to this ambitious publishing project.

"The one thing I knew is I didn't want to be an editor." Liz Schaffer is the editor of Lodestars Anthology, the travel magazine that trades in escapist tales from some of the world's most beautiful destinations. In this episode she speaks about why she never wanted to edit her own magazine, how she ended up being won over, and what are some of the unexpected benefits that have come along the way.

"People think letterpress is supposed to look knackered... We don't do that." Nick Loaring and Pat Randle are the editors, designers, publishers and printers of Double Dagger, the big, beautiful, letterpress journal that we delivered to Stack subscribers in October last year. They stopped in at the Stack offices this week to speak about their love of ink, the evils of photopolymer plates, and the simple beauty of moving type around to create a true letterpress layout.

Independent magazines with a social or ideological mission are hugely popular at the moment, but can they really affect change in the world? Recorded live at The Book Club in London on 30 January 2018, this panel discussion brings together a group of the people behind those independent magazines, speaking about the challenges and opportunities they face. Featuring: James Cartwright, editor of Weapons of Reason; Rob Orchard, editor of Delayed Gratification; Sean Dagan Wood, editor of Positive News; Samira Shackle, editor of New Humanist; and Justinien Tribillon, editor of Migrant Journal.