We stock about a gazillion different magazine titles as well as stationery across our 5 stores in Australia, New Zealand and online.

Archive for January, 2011

Apartamento #06

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

Apartamento magazine

Some magazines feel like a collector’s item, even when they’re brand new.

It might be because it only comes out twice a year, or because it’s printed on such a luxurious assortment of paper stocks or even because it’s so gosh darn difficult to track down… but Apartamento is absolutely one of these titles. I suspect the real reason, however, is probably because it’s a magazine that’s not afraid to have a point of view, which seems to act as a kind of figurehead for an entire aesthetic, a movement which you didn’t even really know existed before opening it’s pages. Everyday interiors!

We’ve banged on about this before, but perhaps the most interesting thing about Apartamento is that it breaks the mould of what an interiors magazine should be… instead of dealing with interiors, necessarily, it deals with space and how people occupy it.

This is not your Mum’s interiors mag…

Issue #6 features a feature on a guy who lives in a shed built on top of a building in Manhattan (“If you could choose to build any barstool, how come you chose to build this barstool?” probes the interviewer), Tiphaine de Lussy talking about a rambling family chateau in rural France where she’d holiday as a child (complete with carvings from German soliders during the occupation—the charming “Grosse Scheisse 1941″ !)… a look inside a gigantic Guangzhou apartment building and, well, so much more.

As always, our stock is very limited, but we really can’t recommend this one highly enough. Get in quick!

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My Top 5 Mags: Acclaim

Thursday, January 20th, 2011

Acclaim magazine

Back in the early ’00s, I worked in a market research call centre. Poised there between hours of 4pm and 8pm (all the better to interrupt your dinner! Ha Ha Ha!), dialing telephone numbers off an ancient green-on-black computer terminal I’d ask questions down the line like, “Would you agree with the statement that brand X is an ‘arrogant’ margarine?” “And would you agree STRONGLY, VERY STRONGLY or EXTREMELY STRONGLY?”

Needless to say, I didn’t last very long. Being a poverty stricken student seemed preferable to the drudgery of randomly dialing the public at large. At worst you’d get someone who wanted to scream at you and, at best, old men who’d say “Oh, yes, I’ll be right back…” and you’d then hear them pottering around the house for the next fifteen minutes thinking they were getting the ultimate revenge on you and your band of telephonic dinner interrupters.

But, I digress…

One of my abiding memories of this time, more than anything else, is of siting in my little cubicle, wearing my headset microphone and reading a little publication called OUT4FAME. A free bi-monthly zine dedicated to Aussie hip-hop culture… which was, well, honestly a lot better than it sounds now.

Fast forward about a decade and that little zine has blossomed into Acclaim magazine, five years old, 22 issues deep and widely distributed across the globe. The currently issue on our shelves features a cover shot by Japanese photographer Yasumasa Yonehara (he’s the guy that all those American Apparel ads rip-off), articles on sneakers, the emergence of custom motorcycle culture, hip-hop art weirdo Rammellzee (R.I.P!) and all kinds of other great stuff.

In the wake of the release of their fifth birthday issue, editor Alex Weiland dropped by to tell us a bit about her favourite mags…

1. Mass Appeal (R.I.P.)

Mass Appeal magazine

Whilst sadly no longer around, Mass Appeal was a Brooklyn title that had a heap of influence on ACCLAIM back in our early days.

It started as a graffiti zine in the 90s, but evolved into a really solid urban men’s lifestyle title, that whilst rooted in quite a niche scene, wasn’t elitist and was very accessible to the average-joe. I loved the vibe of the mag and the articles were always great.

2. The Face (R.I.P.)

The Face magazine

The Face is basically every magazine editor’s favourite magazine.

So much to appreciate about the title, but what I loved in particular was the way they were never tied to one scene or genre, yet they managed to be able to talk about all of them with credibility. To me, The Face really represented that era of ‘Cool Britannia’, when the UK was killing it in the tastemaker stakes. I have a really strong affection for that time, especially the aesthetic.

3. Super Super

Super Super magazine

Super Super is another terrific English title. Essentially it’s a zine on steroids.

It started around that time the whole Nu-Rave scene was popping off in the UK but it’s now diversified to cover modern pop culture in general. The design of this thing is just nuts (their frequent and purposeful use of low-res images cracks me up) and they always have the most amazing covers.

Super Super is sort of like the show Skins, in magazine form, if you didn’t want to stab every character for constantly being miserable little twits.

4. Playboy

Playboy magazine

Say what you want about Hef, but goddamn Playboy was killer back in the day.

Above all else, what I appreciate about the magazine is that it sold an entire lifestyle to the reader. You weren’t just buying a girly mag, you were entering and participating in a culture.

Who doesn’t want to read about the corruption in Vietnam War effort and then turn the page and look at an amazing set of breasts. It’s not often you can feel intelligent and horny at the same time, but Playboy pulled it off.

5. WAD

WAD magazine

WAD is a French title that is often overlooked, but easily one of the best magazines in the world today. The sheer amount on content in each issue is jaw-dropping, let alone the fact it’s written in both French and English.

Their fashion editorials are always great, and each issue is themed. The Girls issue a few years back was a real stand-out. One of ACCLAIM’s past editors, Pierre, once worked at WAD, and his knowledge was a great asset in our early days.

Honourable mentions: Nylon, Complex, Sneaker Freaker, Lodown, Dazed and Confused, i-D, Miss Behave (RIP), Juxtapoz, Love Sucks Die (RIP), IDN, MAD and pretty much any Japanese magazine ever.

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Metalheads, prisoners and credit card fraud

Monday, January 17th, 2011

Like any e-commerce site, we get our fair share of fraudulent transactions.

Generally they’re pretty easy to spot as, in our case, nine times out of ten they’re for heavy metal magazines (Metal Hammer mostly, but sometimes Kerrang) sent to addresses in Indonesia and Malaysia. Why South-East Asian metalheads represent such a huge proportion of our fraud traffic, I really don’t know. It’s just one of those mysteries that makes me happy to be a part of life’s rich tapestry.

We occasionally get some ‘interesting’ orders, but even battle scarred veterans such as ourselves were amused, back in November, when we noticed Girls of FHM (a yearly best -of compilation of the UK lad’s mags choicest bikini shots) ordered for an inmate at a California State Penitentiary. Apparently prisoners aren’t allowed actual pornography, so FHM and the like are popular substitutes.

Curiosity getting the better of us, we undertook some Internet sleuthing and discovered that our prisoner is a recently incarcerated, serial armed robber with links to the notorious MS-13 gang (yeah, those guys with shaved heads and skulls and rude words written in Spanish tattooed all over their faces that you might have seen on 60 Minutes.)

Of course, we sent the order out as per usual, but we weren’t especially surprised on Thursday when we had a call from the bank querying the charge. Apparently the owner of the card had no memory of ordering any magazines from a website in Australia.

The plot thickens, today, when we received the package returned to us with a California Prisons, “Return to Sender – Not in Custody” sticker. I’d like to imagine that our prisoner escaped, but I guess we’ll never really know. As I said, life’s rich tapestry…

Posted in The Inside Story, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Snob: A magazine for Russian oligarchs

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

As evidenced by one of the latest arrivals onto our shelves, there truly is a magazine out there for everyone. The mag is called “Snob” but unless you happen to be familar with the vagaries of the Cyrillic alphabet, you wouldn’t be able to glean that by simply looking at the cover… because, take a deep breath… this is a magazine for Russian oligarchs. Or failing that, the super rich. Or at the very least, super aspirant.

Snob was founded late last year by mining magnate Mikhail Prokhorov, who has an estimated wealth of around $20 billion and is ranked somewhere between 39th and 24th richest man in the world, depending on who you believe.

Like most Russian oligarchs, Prokhorov’s wealth emerged suddenly in the early 90s during the period of rapid and unregulated privatisation of state owned Soviet assets.

The New Yorker says:

It looks looks like a cross between Tatler and The New York Review of Books, printed on the kind of paper stock usually reserved for royal invitations. It features articles by Gary Shteyngart and Salman Rushdie, photography by Ellen von Unwerth and Francesco Carrozzini, and an alarming cover price of eight dollars. It is aimed at international Russians—those successful, educated cosmopolites who might live part of the time in London or New York but who, the folk at Snob like to say, think in Russian.

In truth, it actually looks a bit like a more brightly coloured, slightly more lavish, Russian take on Monocle. This is the second issue that we’ve carried, but I’m not sure we’ve sold a single copy so far, not yet having stores in either Vladivostock or along the French Riveria. Yet.

Posted in Individual Mag Titles | 2 Comments »

Why we sell things that aren’t magazines

Monday, January 10th, 2011

If you’ve visited any of our Australian stores in the last few months, you will have noticed that we increasingly have more shelf space dedicated to things that aren’t actually magazines at all.

We haven’t reduced our range of titles—to the contrary, we’ve continued to actively expand it—and we’re not dedicating any less floor space to magazines. Rather, we’re shuffling things around and installing extra shelves (thank you IKEA) devoted to displaying graphic design books, Moleskines, steak knives KeepCups and other cool bits and pieces that we think you might like.

But why, you might ask, is the world’s only magazine superstore going to such an effort to sell things that aren’t magazines?

The long and short of it is that selling mags alone is not an easy way to make a buck!

Like book stores, magazine retailers are very quickly diminishing. In today’s world, basing a business entirely on print media is, risky, to put it mildly. That said, magazines are difficult to sell at the best of times. Not only do they have a very limited shelf life, but they also require an extraordinary amount of handling and processing.

Newsagents are keenly aware of that fact and it is for this reason that many newsagents look more like greeting card shops or lotto outlets these days than the printed media specialists of yesteryear. Becoming your local newsagent is our absolute worst nightmare. Our entire business model is founded upon being the antithesis of their “This is not a library” signs, bald spots and impatient stares… not to mention complete lack of comfortable seating, free wi-fi and fresh espresso*!

But we love magazines. Always have, Always will (please, indulge us, and imagine that last line spoken like a craggy Clint Eastwood with a squint in his eye, cigarette in mouth and gun in hand). We’re absolutely determined to continue offering you the biggest and best range of magazines in the world. It’s a difficult proposition, but we know it can be done.

So now, when you wonder why all the model train, witchcraft and ‘alternative living’ magazines have been moved upstairs and replaced with notebooks and patterned sticky tape, well, you know why.

* Sydney readers, we’re still working on getting a coffee machine into our Newtown store. It’s more complicated than it seems but we’re working on it, so hang tight!

Posted in Entrepreneurial, The Inside Story | 1 Comment »