Stack Magazines

"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.