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Time Out Melbourne presents… Magazine speed dating

By mag nation | May 3rd, 2012

Time Out presents... Magazine Speed Dating

In an old episode of Frasier doing the rounds on the re-run circuit up at the higher end of the digital TV spectrum—somewhere between the first season of Mad About You and what seems to be the one episode of Everyone Loves Raymond on an apparently endless loop—there’s a moment where Frasier describes his experience speed dating as “basically all the stress and humiliation of a blind date… times twelve.”

Our friends at Time Out Melbourne are doing their darndest to mitigate these horrors by combining them with the wonder of printed media in a little thing that they call Magazine Speed Dating.

Actually they’re calling it an “indoor-magazine-picnic-date thingo” but it’s basically the same thing.

Due to be held at our Elizabeth Street store on Wednesday 16th May, take a look at Time Out’s site for more details on how to get involved. (They’ve had plenty of applications from the fairer sex, but there’s still room for plenty of men, so get involved fellas!)

Hungry Workshop x mag nation Mother’s Day cards

By mag nation | May 2nd, 2012

Hungry Workshop x mag nation Mother's Day cards

Ever since we discovered Melbourne-based letterpress printers The Hungry Workshop a couple of months ago, we knew we wanted to work with them in some form or another.

Husband and wife duo Jenna and Simon Hipgrave both design and print the most beautiful array of printed material (cards, stationery, wedding invitations and plenty more!) on a 1970 vintage Heidelberg press discovered collecting dust in the corner of Brisbane-based printing shop which they hauled down to Melbourne on the back of a truck and had lifted by crane into their Northcote studio.

The Hungry Workshop - Photo by Eamo Donnelly

We’ve been stocking their range of cards in-store for a little while now, but when we saw Mother’s Day approaching we figured it’d be the perfect opportunity to collaborate on something special.

The result is these beautiful Mother’s Day cards which are a limited edition of 300, printed on 100% carbon neutral stock, designed and letterpressed with love in Melbourne.

The Hungry Workshop - Photo by Eamo Donnelly

Available for any online Mother’s Day subscription purchase (just select a card and add a message at the checkout) and in our stores for $6.95 each or $4.95 with any subscription purchase or as single cards at Nation State.

Thanks to Eamo Donnelly for letting us use his Hungry Workshop studio photos. Check him out over at http://www.islandcontinent.com.au/

Acclaim issue #26

By mag nation | April 19th, 2012

Acclaim magazine Dust La Rock cover

We’ve just received copies of this great new issue of Acclaim magazine.

Inside they talk to cult Melbourne shoemaker Rocco, take a trip to a Riga prison, chat to rapper Iggy Azalea (formerly of Mullumbimby, NSW now based in LA and recently gracing the cover of XXL mag) and find out about how the notorious sticker and graffiti artist B.N.E is working to provide clean water and basic sanitation to people living in extreme poverty.

As one of Acclaim’s ’boutique stockists’ (fancy, huh?) we’re also one of the very few places where you can pick up this limited edition cover by Fools Gold record’s Dust La Rock.

And if you get in quick, you’ll also be able to nab one of issue #25 with the amazing (albeit slightly) NSFW Ken Done cover.

Coffee at King Street, roll the dice and win!

By mag nation | April 16th, 2012

Dice coffee

Today marks the end of a long journey.

After more than a year of protracted wrangling between the council and plumbers and electricians and other assorted contractors of various shapes and forms which we barely knew existed… we are now serving coffee at our King Street, Newtown store.

You heard it here first: as of Monday, people of inner-Western Sydney, we’ll be cranking out delicious espresso for takeaway or to accompany your in-store magazine browsing.

We’re serving coffee from our friends at micro-roastery Four Rascals (it’s delish) and to celebrate, we’re offering a 50% chance of getting your coffee for FREE.

Here’s how it works:

  • Order your coffee. (Bonus points if you order a “Mike”—that’s a three quarter soy latte with 1/4 teaspsoon of sugar)
  • Roll the dice.
  • Did you roll an even number? Pay up, chico.
  • Roll odds? Your coffee is free/gratis/courtesy of the house.

This offer will be running from today right up to the 15th of May or until we give away one million coffees, whichever comes first.

Offscreen magazine

By mag nation | April 10th, 2012

When a magazine dedicated to showing the human side of website and app development crops up, it’s really hard to take it as nothing except a vote for the future of printed media.

Melbourne-based publisher Kai Brach is a web designer and developer who by his own reckoning, only six months ago, “knew nothing about the indie publishing industry, let alone how to design anything in Indesign” yet has managed to put together an absolute beauty of a debut issue for his new magazine Offscreen.

Built around long-form interviews with the people behind the websites and apps that we use every day, Offscreen talks to the developers, designers, entrepreneurs and thinkers shaping our digital future.

The first issue includes a photo essay of the Berlin offices of Soundcloud, a chat with CSS/HTML standards guru Dan Cederholm, Ryan Singer of 37 Signals talking Macbook Airs and meditation as well as the musings of former Last.fm designer Hannah Donovan and plenty more to keep web geeks frothing at the mouth.

Read a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the making of over on their blog, order a copy online or pick one up in-store. Consider us well and truly impressed.

Instagram… and win!

By mag nation | March 29th, 2012

Instagram @mag_nation

Ever since we replaced our big ol’ brick phones with shiny new iDevices last month, we’ve quietly been posting photos up on our new Instagram account every couple days at @mag_nation.

Since we’ve been having such a good time on Instagram, we figured it’d be fun to run a competition up on there.

How does it work?

Well, we’ve got three $50 vouchers up for grabs and all you need to do to enter is to take a photo of your fave magazine of the moment (the more interesting shot the better, so get creative) and annotate it with the comment, “Print’s not dead! @mag_nation #maglove”.

Winner will be chosen at our discretion and entries close in one week from now, so get snapping!

We’re hiring! Calling all customer service Wizards

By mag nation | March 15th, 2012

Yep, we’re hiring for someone to work part time in customer service.

The job is based in Melbourne working within the subscriptions department from our Greville St. Prahran store.

It’s a part time position working 25 hours a week where, essentially, you’ll be one of the human faces of our subscriptions department.

A typical day will include:

  • Taking calls from customers on our in-bound 1800 telephone number.
  • Processing new subscriptions and renewals (yes, this involves a fair bit of data entry).
  • Answering customer service e-mails (“Where is my magazine?”) and following up with publishers and distributors (“Where is that customer’s magazine?”)
  • Helping to package up and send out customer orders.
  • Putting together invoices and basic Excel spreadsheets.

Ideally, we’re looking for someone with a bit of customer service experience and lots of common sense.

Please send through your CV with a cover letter to info@magnation.com with the subject line “Your call is important to us…”

Waiting for Eustace Tilly

By mag nation | February 27th, 2012

The New Yorker cover: Loading

This made us laugh:

The New Yorker are evidently having a bit of fun with the problems they’ve had with their own notoriously unstable iPad app with this cover of last week’s issue (Feb 13th – 20th), harking back to the cover of the very first issue (starring their very own personified dandy, the esteemed Mr. Eustace Tilly) overlaid with a ‘loading’ graphic that will surely be familar to iOS users.

It turns out that this cover was actually submitted by New Yorker reader, Brett Culbert, a thirty-year-old landscape historian—whatever that is—and is one of the twelve Eustace Tilley Contest winners for 2012. The magazine modified Culbert’s original entry for this cover, but it’s the first time in the magazine’s 87 year history that a reader submission has ended up on the cover in one form or another, nonetheless.

(For the record, while we had a laugh about this cover, a quick poll of our offices reveals that wholly three quarters of us own a Kindle or iPad or both which we all unanimously enjoy using for reading alongside our unquenchable mag habits. Analog and digital, hand in hand… it’s the future we tells ya!)

Hi there, Kinfolk

By mag nation | February 24th, 2012

Kinfolk magazine

Inside Kinfolk magazine issue #2

Ever since the Spanish ‘everyday interiors’ mag Apartamento appeared on our shelves three or so years ago, we’ve noticed a wealth of imitators and spin-offs from across the publishing spectrum from design to fashion to gardening.

And for good reason, we reckon!

By eschewing the familar fodder of airbrushed and overstyled Bavarian hunting lodges and Miami infinity pool perfection, Apartamento created a wholly new kind of interiors magazine about space and the ways in which we we occupy it.

A brand new arrival on our shelves called Kinfolk, does much the same thing but for eating and entertaining… and frankly, we’re a little bit impressed.

Kinfolk is about the simple joys of togetherness and connecting over food rather than bringing the restaurant into the home. You won’t find a single mention of molecular gastronomy or even one perfect starched table cloth between these pages, but instead  you’ll find out about the simple pleasures of a plate of fresh fruit… of baking your own bread and chatting around a fire.

They say:

Every element of Kinfolk – the features, photography, and general aesthetics – are consistent with the way we feel entertaining should be: simple, uncomplicated, and less contrived. Kinfolk is the marriage of our appreciation for art and design and our love for spending time with family and friends.

The bad news? We had so much demand (and such limited supply!) for this title all but one of our copies has been sent out today to fulfill our online pre-orders.

The good news? To make things fair, we’re giving that one remaining copy away.

If you want to win, tell us in 30 words or less in the comments below why you deserve this one last copy of Kinfolk #2. It might be a haiku or a link to a YouTube video of you doing a Kinfolk –lusting interpretive dance, heck, whatever. Most impressive answer wins.

Just announcing our feature film debut. No biggie.

By mag nation | February 13th, 2012

Thanks to our friends at Time Out Melbourne (sign up for their newsletter Melbournians, they have sweet giveaways out the wazoo), we managed to get along to an advance screening of the new Aussie film Any Questions for Ben last week.

Written by Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch (the guys behind The Castle, The Dish, etc.), it’s the story of a successful yet spiritually unfulfilled 20-something branding consultant searching for a scrap of meaning in this vast ol’ universe of ours.

As I was taking the first exploratory licks of a banana flavoured choc-top and settling into my seat about 30 seconds or a minute in, I noticed that… the lead character was shopping for magazines… in our Elizabeth Street store!

All told, our cinematic debut lasts for no more than maybe 10 or 15 seconds and, yeah, I’d say that they took a bit of creative license portraying our staff (“this, like, just, like came out in the US, like, yesterday!”) but it was still a bit of a proud moment.

I left the film still baffled as to how we ended up in it, but digging through some e-mails the next day, I discovered that the production company arranged this with us about two years ago and we’d promptly forgotten all about it.

Melbourne is everywhere in Any Questions for Ben.

From drinks at Rooftop Bar to The Melbourne Cup to the café at the State Library, it’s lovely to see our city so gloriously represented up on the big screen. In all honesty, the film is a bit cheesy. But in the best possible way… imagine perennial TV favourite Love Actually set among Melbourne’s laneways and you’re coming close.

Starring Josh Lawson and Miss Teen Tasmania 1998, Rachel Taylor as well as Spicks and Specks’ Alan Brough in a top notch supporting roll, heck, get along to it just to see us in our silver screen debut! It’s in cinemas now.