Sitting around the office yesterday, we had noticed the proliferation of little pamphlet-sized magazines in our fair city—in fact, in cities all over the country. These are neat little publications, not because of anything that is in them, necessarily, but just because of the way they are. The format is fun, easy to pick up, maybe tuck into your back pocket—if your back pocket isn’t already occupied by a wallet full of ATM receipts which represent cash that very briefly occupied that same space.
There are a couple of competing titles here in the Twin Cities. One is the clunky, unfortunately named “The Cites,” which has some kind of pronunciation bar over the “e.” (Note to self: simple puns rely on simple recognition. The sights? The citations?) For about six months, we read this as a typographic error in their very logo, rather than a device of surpassing cleverness. We hear through the grapevine that “Industry” is a knockoff started by a band of disgruntled “Cites” mutineers. (We hope this revolution was started by a righteous copy editor, but we have our doubts.)
Neither of these magazines has an editor, per se, which is fine because neither really has much editorial content to speak of. This is alright by us. The pictures are certainly pretty, the paper is heavy and white, and there is a certain sassiness to the design that must appeal to the twenty-something audience that palms these little magazines in the lobbies of strib clubs and martini bars.
As it turns out, a lot of serious Big League magazines are now toying with this sort of format, particularly in Europe. A couple years ago, Conde Nast-Europe began publishing pocket-sized versions of GQ and one or two other titles. In fact, the paractice goes way back, at least to World War II. One of the secrets of the New Yorker’s massive success was their “pony edition” which they published during the war, without advertisements, for the leisure of American soldiers abroad. When those GIs came home, they were easily converted into a massive inflow of subscribers to the full-sized, ad-enhanced version of the magazine.
One can never think too literally about media, especially about the way people actually use the TV, or a CD, a book, or a magazine. What does it feel like in your hands? What is the actual, concrete experience of using this form of entertainment? In the magazine world, we frequently talk about “heft” value. How heavy is it in your hands? (Warning to all self-respecting editors: this, sadly, bears no relationship at all to the “substance” therein. Those perfume inserts are great scale-tippers though!) Part of this is down to nothing more than advertising. More advertising equals more pages. More pages equals more respect. Advertisers are pack animals, and they tend to gather where other advertisers have gathered. As our friend Dave Pirner once said, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.
And yet, we think it is more than professional jealously that compells us to say what we must now say: It is possible to have TOO much of a good thing—whether it is ad pages or edit pages. There is nothing as easy to ignore as a 400-page issue of Vanity Fair, as great as that magazine is. And we very nearly missed Dave Eggers’ disarmingly restrained story on Monty Python in the “Winter Fiction” issue of The New Yorker, just because we find these fat theme issues off-putting.
We look at our so-called competitors here in Minneapolis/St.Paul, and we are exercised. We strain our back picking these door-stoppers up off the floor beneath the mail slot, and we are just overwhelmed by hundreds of pages of… well, nothing much at all. (The size itself is annoying. But what is infuriating is how little they do with how much they have. There is a special circle in hell reserved for the idle rich.)
To be perfectly fair, the January issue of Vanity Fair—traditionally one of the thinnest of the year, advertisers having blown their wads in December—always sets records for uninterrupted edit pages, this year something like 80 straight full-pages of feature stories and jump pages. We find this nearly unreadable too. It’s just too much. We prefer to invest that much time into a good book with a sustained subject and voice. Or a video game.—The Editor in Cheese
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