Repository of soul-grindingly tedious publications

I am lolling at that

Seriously, I bet John Locke was a regular subscriber.

http://www.brunton.co.uk/images/layout/mag%20covers/fci-cover-lge.jpg

http://www.topflightmarketing.com/image-files/portfolio_uj_2002_10_cover.jpg

matt dc, ilxor's own angus deayton.

I think I'll give this sort of tawdry exploitation a miss. I mean, don't you have any golden retrievers to kick?

(I am currently engaged in a work-related trawl around the dullest bits of the publishing industry, it's kind of terrifying)

http://www.scaffold.org/associations/3901/files/2008SIAMEDIA.jpg

http://www.software-link.com/images/Accounting_Technology_12-06.jpg

http://www.nme.com/layout/magImage.php

Both of these have a lot to answer for:

http://www.loti.com/sixties_music/teen_mags/calling_all_girls_194711.jpg

http://www.loti.com/sixties_music/teen_mags/No_8_thumb.jpg

(NB this isn't all Have I Got News For You lol Compost Weekly magazines as that would get pretty boring pretty quickly)

NME = textbook opener though.

http://www.lps.co.uk/~landmark/images/icons/31.png

Calling All Girls magazine = the world as the British press wants us to return to, every time they complain about Sugar magazine or something.

http://www.xoprojects.com/images/projects_perf/n+1.gif

^^^Win.

lol

The trade magazine for unemployed liberal arts professionals

http://i.buyoly.com/believerNov06_med.jpg

Calling All Girls := classic example of a date rate

I think we had another thread where a lot of us came to the conclusion that The Believer = not really so bad.

http://www.theonion.com/content/files/images/onionmagazine_archive_109a.jpg

lol

http://www.antiquebarbedwiresociety.com/2007_cover_thumb.jpg
as featured on BBC's "Have I Got News For You".

The trade magazine for unemployed liberal arts professionals

Say what you will about n+1, but I think "overemployed" is probably more accurate.

http://www.magazine.org/Editorial/07BestCovers/News/zoom/bNews13.jpg

http://www.dazedsubs.com/ImagesData/full_00132.jpg

this one is like "hey, you know your shit, you don't need any shoreditch cockfarmers telling you what to wear, right? this is just another magazine, see? that'll be eight quid thanks."

Man I would so love to have some of these not the music ones so much tho.

In partic, the cardboard ones would probably rule.

Barbed wire collector too if it's real.

Oh, wow. Barbed wire collector can be bought w/paypal!

ha ha "WHY THE VIOLENCE MUST STOP NME"

RAZORLIGHT
FINALLY A SOLO RECORD

"the intellectual scene"

i really miss jane magazine

"We want to make it illegal to beat goths until they die"

Yours,

Conor McNicholas

"the intellectual scene"

-- sunny successor, Thursday, April 10, 2008 4:57 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

yeah im kind of tempted to look the mag up to see wtf this even means.

i had a temp job a few years ago at a company that made boxed and bottled juices from concentrate. i was answering the phones but it was memorial day so there was no one in the office and no one calling about anything. i ended up spending the whole day reading every single magazine in their waiting room, 90 percent of which were food industry trade magazines. they were really surreal, all the articles were about thickening agents and gums and had big ads for smoke-flavor chemicals and food dyes.

trade magazines are the repository of tedium BY DEFINITION. my first job was at this august publication:

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1165/776014020_87ec008e1d_o.jpg

That's a nice cover!

It's got that same feel as looking at grainy photos of concrete council blocks taken when they were new and pristine.

ha ha that's a nice image of DC Metro. . .look how far we've come

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:NTSB-Woodley-Park-Accident.png

ahem

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/NTSB-Woodley-Park-Accident.png

My feeling is that 90% of people who bag on the Believer either (a) have never actually read much/any of it, or (b) are not interested in the kind of publication it is in the first place

(The first category often includes pop-culture types who learned to bag on Eggers or McSweeney's in the same style one bags on the Shins and the Postal Service, or Garden State and Juno, and have decided that it's a good pose to extend this to the Believer)

(The second category often includes people who are averse to the entire concept of lit-mag essays and would consider them "pretentious" no matter where they ran, but don't go around bagging on the NYRB or Granta, because they've never paid attention to them, and have only taken note of the Believer because it exists in the pop-culture view of that first group, kinda)

(Less-reasonable conclusion: 70% of people bagging on the Believer are actually bagging on themselves and Sufjan Stevens)

The Intellectual Scene: A Day in the Life of the N+1 Staff

Note: the epic, extended music-and-the-Believer discussion was on this thread:

The Believer Magazine - New Issue with Free Covers Comp.

In which someone said:

I bought it a couple of times on a whim. Both times I was really disapointed. The one good thing was a reprint of that "Army Man" fanzine the guys who did the Simpsons did. That was almost made it worth it alone. The bookish ramblings that made up the bulk of the articles bored me to tears.

I.e. "I bought a LIT MAG and it was so BOOKISH, it should have more stuff related to the SIMPSONS"

it's bookish in a highly specific, douchey, way, though. so is the 'granta' as it goes -- 'that kind of publication' is a relatively recent phenomenon, and ripe for dissing.

My feeling is that 90% of the time someone on ILX bags on an indie culture punching bag like The Believer or Vampire Weekend, nabisco will expend way too much effort defending it.

don't patronize me nabisco

don't see the comparison with nyrb which, whatever you might think of it, has a rather different role than 'the believer'.

You are British, stop saying 'douchey'.

I don't find it douchey. But if you really wanna go, why don't we take this outside to the other thread

it's 'bookish' in the 'studied english literature at university' way i guess is what i mean.

Repository of axe-grindingly tedious attitudes

the believer is great if only because DCBerman occasionally contributes and amy sedaris does an advice column

I haven't looked at it for a while, but I notice the current issue has a conversation between Werner Herzog and Erroll Morris, so that's at least one thing that's worth reading and probably not tedious.

You are British, stop saying 'douchey'.

-- Matt DC, Thursday, 10 April 2008 16:26 (7 minutes ago)

chillax broslice

nabisco OTM

"broslice" is making me lol hard

especially hearing it in a brit accent

I haven't looked at it for a while, but I notice the current issue has a conversation between Werner Herzog and Erroll Morris, so that's at least one thing that's worth reading and probably not tedious.

-- Hurting 2, Thursday, April 10, 2008 5:32 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

if you want amazing tedious challenging opinions, herzog on pretty much anything documentary filmmaking is your guy.

CANADIAN PIZZA MAGAZINE

Magazine cover blurbs and the titles of magazine features should all be cribbed from ILX thread titles. e.g.

Where the titties at?
TS: Sauerkraut vs. Onion Sauce
tornado!

if you want amazing tedious challenging opinions, herzog on pretty much anything documentary filmmaking is your guy.

-- banriquit, Thursday, April 10, 2008 4:41 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

^^^ CHALLENGING OPINION

I'm not gonna defend Believer, but I read and usually enjoy it.

i had a temp job a few years ago at a company that made boxed and bottled juices from concentrate. i was answering the phones but it was memorial day so there was no one in the office and no one calling about anything. i ended up spending the whole day reading every single magazine in their waiting room, 90 percent of which were food industry trade magazines. they were really surreal, all the articles were about thickening agents and gums and had big ads for smoke-flavor chemicals and food dyes.

-- n/a, Thursday, April 10, 2008 4:05 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

Carrageenan - C/D, S/D

Yeah Werner Herzog is so BORING. God.

he is! if he'd made an interesting film in 25 years, it would be okay, but he repeats himself over and over.

McSweeney's was good when it was obviously a lark, a way to waste time. I guess it still is that (I wouldn't know), but once it became a "thing" its sneery superiority began to grate.

I was going to include the cover of my company's in-house "magazine" (called "Buzz") but in a strange fit of reasonableness the powers that be have apparently not deemed it worthy of a web presence.

McSweeney's was good when it was obviously a lark, a way to waste time. I guess it still is that (I wouldn't know), but once it became a "thing" its sneery superiority began to grate.

Um, okay what does this mean? This makes NO sense

I've actually read very little of the McSweeney's quarterly, which is completely different from the website.

I had one issue, which was kind of neat - it was a box with each article or story in an individual pamphlet for which the author had chosen cover art. There was a good story by George Saunders, an interesting article about Nabokov's troubled relationship with the cover designs given his books (particularly post-Lolita when publishers tried to make all of his books look scandalous), a not-very-good story by Rick Moody and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember. All-in-all, not a complete waste of time.

The web site kind of reads like someone wrote down all the time-waster conversations and larks the employees of a record store had on a slow day.

Haha, I subliminally used tracer's word.

http://www.faithmouse.com/dramatic_prarie_dog_blog.jpg

I didn't even realize there was a paper version of McSweeney's! Haha oops

xpost!

I can't decide if I'm confused by that: when do you consider it to have become a "thing?" Is it by readership or content? Because ... I think it was by the third issue that they had people like Saunders and Murakami in there (and alleged DFW pseudonym, right?), so I feel like its literary thing-ness was always there, even before Eggers got well-known on the book. But perhaps you mean the point where the website started accreting a kind of culture of McSweeney's fandom around it. (I admit, I haven't paid any attention to the publication itself since around the third or fourth one.)

(Ha, Hurting, that box one = the one I mean, obviously -- those Saunders "Institutional Monologues" in it are SO terrific)

Better than McSweeney's or the Onion, although (because?) it wasn't as consistent, was the mighty Washington Pissed

I still want to buy "Most Fucked-Up Person Alive", the dude sounds like a cross between TOMBOT and dave q

Haha Tracer there's no NON-paper version of McSweeney's! Honestly, I swear to god, you're not alone here: I think LOADS of people look at the reader-submitted stuff on the web page and think that actually constitutes the publication. Which is amazing, kind of on the level of never noticing the videos on YouTube and then saying the message threads are idiotic and why would anyone even look at this.

P.S. Here are Saunders's "Four Institutional Monologues," of which the first one is absolutely wonderful and the third one makes a nice dessert to it.

http://www.thegodparticle.com/2003_08/01Saunders.html

I think LOADS of people look at the reader-submitted stuff on the web page and think that actually constitutes the publication.

wait it's reader submitted??

and alleged DFW pseudonym, right?

yah Mr. Squishy was first published in #5 or 6 under the name ELizabeth Klemm or something

my world is spinning

nabisco I never knew that! I was aware, however, that YouTube is a site for watching videos. You enormous cockfarmer.

I haven't looked lately, but it's historically been pretty ... borderline? I.e., a lot of the little web nuggets are pieces sent in by, basically, readers, which is probably why I know about 8 million people who say "I've had something published by McSweeney's" (translation: "I sent in a funny list in 2003 and it showed up on the web page somewhere")

MEOW TRACER I'M JUST SAYING, AND REASSURING YOU THAT YOU ARE NOT ALONE IN THAT MISCONCEPTION

P.S. SMALL FAMILY-OWNED COCK-FARMS EVERYWHERE HAVE LOST THE ABILITY TO COMPETE WITH ENORMOUS AGRI-COCK-BUSINESS CONCERNS, IT IS AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY WHICH IS NOT FUNNY

the website is hit and miss--mostly miss. it's funny like once a month or something. a lot of times, i will start reading the website, very quickly "get" the concept/gag and then stop reading

the quarterly, when i read it, always has at least once good, interesting, creative piece of fiction. i sometimes wish it looked like a regular journal instead of, you know, wackily shaped/designed. . .

"a lit journal! but printed on a breadstick! by giraffes!" etc etc

I thought breadsticks were what all magazines were made out of. That's how massively stupid I am.

no no no these breadsticks are handcrafted in the andes mountains by sky giraffes

you can't read it in the small print there, but there's a great editorial response in that issue of Corrugated: Today! to that episode of the simpsons where the kids visit the box factory. the ed. calls for industry-wide retooling of safety procedures for school group tours.

Well you should have said! I haven't read anything made by sky giraffes since at least 1998, or whatever.

xpost

yeah i ain't read sky giraffe shit in a hot minute

about 8 million people who say "I've had something published by McSweeney's" (translation: "I sent in a funny list in 2003 and it showed up on the web page somewhere")

haha yeah. i tried! didn't make the cut. maybe next time!

I almost got the layout/prepress gig for a national journal of forensic cryptography or somesuch, and I was REALLY excited about it. Wound up passing on the job, actually, which was probably stupid.

A former colleague of my wife at the Ole Miss journalism dept. has a pretty cool gig, establishing himself as an expert on magazine publishing. He gets just about every US magazine in existence and a bunch of international ones, and when he's done cataloguing them for his annual book, a lot of them go onto a rack outside his office for anybody to grab.

Garden & Gun!
http://mrmagazine.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/garden-gun-10x.jpg

"it's bookish in a highly specific, douchey, way,"

the article in the issue that mark posted a picture of about the black newspaper in st. louis was AEWSOME!

you can read the whole thing:

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200611/?read=article_eden

you could make a really good collection of believer stuff that was totally NON-douchey.

I've never seen the Believer web site before now! Strange how much the layout reminds me of McSweeney's circa 1998. What a pointless post.

actually, the magazine i edit probably falls under this category for anyone not interested in municipal government in arkansas.
http://s15.photobucket.com/albums/a359/ettiem/?action=view¤t=Snapshot2008-04-1013-58-22.jpg
but it's a pretty invaluable resource (or it strives to be, anyway) for local government.

City & Town, the official publication of the Arkansas Municipal League
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a359/ettiem/CT.jpg

http://www.loti.com/sixties_music/teen_mags/calling_all_girls_194711.jpg

Is this actually from the 50s, or is it "lol, 50s"?

Based on the jpeg filename, it would seem to be from Nov, 1947.

aw... this thread started off like a funny new James Lileks web gallery, and then you all had to go proving how tasteful you are.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51XJWF6P1WL._AA280_.jpg

tedious no, SOUL GRINDING YES

City & Town, the official publication of the Arkansas Municipal League

-- andrew m., Thursday, 10 April 2008 20:06 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

That's a class cover tho.

there are some pretty mind-numbing mags in the dental industry i can tell you that
but DPR (Denta1 Products Rep0rt obv) kind of rules for sheer level of mouth-and-teeth-major-issues grossness

Mormon mags:

For adults:

http://www.lds.org/images/Magazines/Ensign/2008/April/en08apr_cover_small.jpg
For teens:

http://www.lds.org/images/Magazines/NewEra/2008/April/ne08apr_cover_small.jpg

I think Watchtower & Awake are totally great publications, tho! Always cheer up my visit to the laundromat. "Yoga: Sinful"?

For some reason this keeps coming in the mail:

http://images.pennnet.com/in_this_issue/lfw444_cover.jpg

???

Wide Format Imaging is a pretty entertaining read, if you like reading about printing:

http://mondotimes.tradepub.com/free/mr/images/mrc.gif

http://www.mondomags.com/magcom/covers/0/06/230/0062306_l.gif

http://mondotimes.tradepub.com/free/mapn/images/mapnc.gif

MAN: Modern Applications News

i misread that first one there as Lesser Focus World. i'm glad now i misread because i'm now going to create that magazine.

http://mondotimes.tradepub.com/free/bt/images/btc.gif

Pig International!

http://mondotimes.tradepub.com/free/pig/images/pigc.gif

http://mondotimes.tradepub.com/free/pf/images/pfc.gif

I feel I am falling behind on some pressing news. I need a Pigment Update.

http://www.loveleaf.net/magazine/READERS_DIGEST.jpg

Meanwhile in the back hallway, the Inkjet Explosion is just never going to come out of the carpet before the boss notices, you have to give it up and start thinking of excuses, dude.

there was a short article in the believer about black writers + tokenization that i liked a couple months ago. but i studied english at university.

http://images.magazinecity.com/prodimg-3631-12.jpg

heh -- Reader's Digest: the best reading gramma's house has to offer. Ask for it by name.

ts: "This American Life" vs. "Life In These United States"

http://images.magazinecity.com/prodimg-4354-52.jpg

LIFE IN THESE UNITED STATES, HELLO

http://images.magazinecity.com/0128-1.jpg

yeah i gather that might be the disconnect lol xp to horseshoe

http://images.magazinecity.com/prodimg-plp-12.jpg

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00006KTRB.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
+ 15 similar

made the mistake of going to a builders' show and using my real address

Prepared Foods but are they prepared for the earthquake happening in that cover photo?

http://images.magazinecity.com/0928-20.jpg

better than 2/3 of the shit you can buy at B&N

http://www.minwax.com/listserv/images/cover_wood_beautiful.jpg

http://images.magazinecity.com/prodimg-10dh-4.jpg

Pretty easy to misread "perils" there

Can anyone explain why the same publishing company publishes The World Of Cross Stitching, Cross Stitch Crazy, Cross Stitch Card Shop, Cross Stitch GOLD and Cross Stitch Favourites? Is there some sort of major brand differentiation factor that I'm missing?

http://images.magazinecity.com/prodimg-ibg-1.jpg

"Dear Old People Magazine,

My wife and I live in a cold climate, and we are accustomed to wearing sweaters around the house for much of the year. But one spring weekend, my mother-in-law came to visit. She's a horrible cunt She said this funny thing.

Signed,
It was really funny, please dont tell my wife how thinly veiled my acrid hatred is.
Dayton, OH"

Hahaha Matt have you ever MET a cross-stitcher? They'll want all the magazines.

http://images.magazinecity.com/prodimg-ua-12.jpg

sorry, that was Life In These United States

I don't know if anyone here reads "The Born Loser," but they steal all their jokes from the Reader's Digest that came out one year ago.

"Dear old people magazine,

While I was in the military, OMG YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE TO READ THE REST OF THIS, YOU JUST KNOW IT'S GOING TO BE FUNNIER THAN BEETLE BAILEY!

P.S. I am a hero."

So people who buy one will buy all of them, so they can basically publish as many as they like without cannibalising market share? And they don't need to actually sell that many of each one, as people who buy one will buy another five or six?

1X LICENCE TO PRINT MONEY.

http://images.magazinecity.com/4847-12.jpg

featuring an elderly Pleasant Plains

This is the most mind-blowing magazine cover I have ever seen:

http://images.magazinecity.com/7349-12.jpg

Oh wau that was designed by a nine-year old using Pagemaker, right?

lol @ "Wood Beautiful"

i am disappointed by the lack of Comic Sans on these front covers

I seriously wish I was responsible for that copy of "Executive Brief."

http://www.adeptgroup.net/pvmag.jpg

Haha that one is wonderful.

http://www.pcimag.com/PCI/Home/Images/PCI-Cover0308.jpg

This is the closest thing I can find to a magazine about watching paint dry.

I bet there is a trade journal about that.

Haha, I'll bet "Waiting for the Bus" was the product of a lively cover meeting.