Stack Magazines

"I didn't want to only do one thing..." Bardia Koushan is editor and art director of Autodidact, the magazine that brings together work by a wide range of artists and creative people. The second issue came out a few weeks ago, themed around the idea of mistakes, and I really enjoyed speaking to him about the different types of mistakes they included, and particularly the mistakes he made while making the issue. I love it when magazine makers speak openly about the pitfalls of publishing, and as he says, “You can’t make an issue on mistakes and not embrace it yourself.”

"The bathing community is something special – if you know you know..." Ekin Balcioglu and Steve Weiner are the founding editors of Hamam, a new magazine that celebrates the art and culture of bathing. Inviting readers inside the world’s bath houses, saunas and hot springs, they're clearly having fun in their new role as bathing ambassadors, but there's something else going on here too. It’s hinted at in Hamam’s strapline, “The magazine of letting go”, and I was interested to hear how this magazine taps into their spiritual beliefs as well as a pursuit of freedom, openness and equality.

"It's so Fare to be going to the grandmother's kitchen..." Ben Mervis is editor-in-chief of Fare, the magazine that travels to a different city each issue to report on the food culture it finds there. For their latest issue they went off to Antwerp in Belgium, and as he explains, they completed their trips to the city by the start of March, just before coronavirus restrictions kicked in. But with COVID-19 severely limiting the travel and hospitality industries for the foreseeable future, they have made dramatic changes to the magazine to make sure they will be able to keep on publishing over the coming months.

"What happens when London prices out every artist?" Lucy Fowler is editor and art director of Mind the Gap, the magazine she made as part of her fashion journalism course at Central Saint Martin’s in London. Frustrated by the inequalities she found in Britain's creative industries, she wanted to showcase some of the unsung artists, designers, musicians and other creative people found outside the London bubble, and the result is a brilliantly fun and impassioned piece of independent publishing.

"We want writers to see us publishing work that might not be published elsewhere..." Jules Danskin and Heather Parry are the managing director and editorial director of Extra Teeth, a literary magazine that publishes great new writing from Scotland. They sent us copies of their first two issues recently and I was really impressed not just by the quality but also the range of the writing, and as you’ll hear during our conversation, part of their motivation in making the magazine is to challenge and redefine what Scottish writing really is – there’s a clear ambition to look beyond what they call the highlands and islands and Edinburgh noir, and find something else.

This year’s Indiecon festival took place in Hamburg from 5–6 September, bringing people together from all over Europe for a brilliantly defiant (but still socially distanced) celebration of print. This special episode of the podcast was recorded at Indiecon by Nina Prader from Lady Liberty Press, and features the people behind Alien magazine (Portugal), Club Sandwich (France), C/O Vienna (Austria) and Word (Germany).

"We get to be the seagulls following the trawler..." Rob Orchard is one of the editors behind Delayed Gratification, the quarterly news magazine that looks back at events once the dust has settled and takes a slow, considered approach to retelling stories with the benefit of hindsight. Their current issue covers the period from January to March this year, which of course was when coronavirus first emerged from Wuhan and started spreading around the world, and in this episode Rob talks about how he and the team brought a clear and fresh perspective to a story you might think you already know.

"We thought we'd make a printed exhibition in the format of a magazine..." Anja Dietmann and Max Predinger are two of the people behind Pfeil, the Hamburg-based art magazine that we delivered to Stack subscribers in June this year. This isn’t a magazine about art – the magazine itself is conceived as an artwork and they’re absolutely committed to each issue’s artistic concept, which leads them to do some slightly crazy things with it.

Bijan Berahimi is the founder and editor of Joon, which he describes as a sort of love letter to Portland. Bijan runs Fisk design studio and gallery in Portland and the magazine is a collaboration between Fisk and Brown Printing, one of the city’s main printing companies, and you can clearly see that they’re using the project to show off the stuff they can do. It’s an absolutely gorgeous piece of print, with lovely bright colours, loads of different paper types, glosses, foils and finishes, but it’s also a really readable magazine with a lovely warm feeling of community and some genuinely surprising storytelling.

"It's a grind. You have to get out there and do it..." Chris M Walsh is founder and editor of Fifty Grande, the travel magazine that goes deep to uncover the real USA. Chris is an experienced editor, having spent time at Billboard and Zagat, and now he’s drawing on the lessons he learned from those big, corporate publishers, while also improvising and getting his hands dirty with the scrappy business of small independent publishing.