Magazine Titles

People still say that print magazines will be dead within a decade. These people are wrong. Print magazines will be around probably forever, for the same reason that books will be. People like carefully-made, individual instances of things, even things that could be abstracted to their forms. What this will mean, of course, is that any magazine people were buying just for its content will be moved online. This has been happening for a while. On the other hand, the magazines (and books) that survive will do so with an increased attention to design and tactile beauty.

A few of the magazines that especially intrigue me are the culture magazine The Believer, the literary magazine McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and the just-founded culinary journal Fire and Knives. This last has an amazing name, by the way. Superbly concrete and expressive. Instead of calling it Food or Kitchen, or some such, it simply names two of the most ancient and essential implements for making food. From reading the title, you know that it must concern food, but the way that it moves around the subject hints that it will be about more than just recipes. And it is. Plus, it's fun and dangerous to say. Try it. Fire and Knives. Awesome.

The Believer and McSweeney's, of course, boast catchy and memorably names as well, and are distinguished by excellent, highly varied writing and gorgeous, ever shifting covers. The Believer's cover art is done by illustrator and graphic novelist Charles Burns, and McSweeney's changes entirely with each publication. They're all certainly worth a look. I especially love that the page for ordering the first issue of Fire and Knives informs its audience that the magazine is set in Perpetua and Gill Sans. Who does that? A magazine that knows its audience.

Via Magculture

The Road: A Comedic Translation, and Confessions of a Book Pirate

For anyone who has read Comac McCarthy's The Road, this is a must. Thank goodness for The Millions. Great literary websites like this are nigh extinct now.

Another great article is this one, an interview with an anonymous internet book pirate. I won't get too into it now, as my anti-intellectual-property rant is currently being saved for my senior thesis, but the interview strikes many of the most important points in the issue: people who pirate the most are usually the people most in love with the medium, these people are also willing to pay for nice physical copies of the same works, these sorts people contribute more to the exposure and hence, the sales, of a work than almost any other factor, and in cases where authors and publishing companies have put their works up for free downloading, such as Cory Doctorow and the Baen Free Library, they have actually experienced increases in revenue.