T-World pretty much encapsulates everything that we love about niche publishing: it’s highly specialised (yes, it’s a whole magazine about t-shirts!), it’s opinionated and informative, it’s an absolute visual feast and, would you believe, it’s mostly the work of one man.

Eddie Zammit, you see, is a bona fide t-shirt nut (when he appeared on ABC TV’s Collectors last year he owned just over 1700 tees, and you can bet he’s added countless more since then) and up until recently he’s juggled his day day job as the Creative Director of a Melbourne design studio with channelling his passion for ink on cotton into, well, ink on paper.

Indeed, so many of our favourite mags are almost entirely produced by just one or two highly dedicated, passionate people who work day jobs to pay the bills and spend their nights, weekends and any other free moment doing any of the thousands of tasks that fall on the shoulders of just one person when you’re an independent publisher.

As a result, many of these titles don’t really keep especially regular release schedules and occasionally the time elapsed between issues drags out and becomes longer and longer… and longer.

Probably a week doesn’t pass when we don’t get an e-mail, tweet or phone call asking when the new issue of T-World is coming out and now that it’s been more than a year since the last issue, I have to say we were beginning to lose all hope of ever seeing issue #7.

It was with a great big sigh of relief then, that we saw this video teaser posted up on Facebook today, giving us just a taste of what we can expect from the forthcoming New York issue.

We’re told that it’s due out in November. Fingers and toes crossed.

Literally the biggest mag of the year (seriously, this thing is a phone book), the September issue of Vogue US has hit newstands stateside and should be arriving in our stores in just under two weeks.

As we wrote this time last year, Vogue US is just about the least popular of all the Vogue brethren for 11 months of the year but undoubtedly rules the roost for the month of September.

Due to the ‘unique’ (there are other words I’d like to use here) nature of magazine distribution it is always problematic to increase our orders for this one issue alone. Throw in the fact that Kate Moss is on the cover and you have a very in demand magazine with potentially very few copies hitting the shelves.

Just like every year, we’re gonna fight to get as many copies for our customers as we can but we absolutely make no guarantees that there will be enough for everybody.

The very best way to make sure that you do get a copy is to simply click the ‘Buy next issue’ button on the Vogue US page on our website and we’ll put you a copy in the post as soon as they arrive.

There’s a brand new issue of Acclaim magazine out and it’s a good one, to be sure.

Inside #24 is the ‘Fantasy Issue’ and includes a feature on rap savant Lil B, a Twerps photographic tour diary shot by the inimitable Patrick O’Neill on his army of Olympus XA cameras, an interview with artist Ivan Benic (blame him for the concept of airbrushed fantasy artwork on panel vans!), a memorial feature on the late Japanese artist and director Nagi Noda and chat with a guy who has 30 million hits of LSD hanging on his walls (yes, actually.)

As a special bonus for mag nation customers you’ll get a special limited-edtion glow-in-the-dark cover (with an amazing retro-futuristic cover illustration by Swedish illustrator Kilian Eng) that’s not being sold anywhere else.

We’re hosting a launch for this issue at our Sydney store on Thursday, 18th August from 6pm and we’d love to see you there!

Two long anticipated titles turned up yesterday in the form of The Plant Journal and Lucky Peach, as well as new issues of Grafik and It’s Nice That (the latter featuring a wonderful interview with pioneering ad man George Lois.)

The Plant Journal is a new magazine from the makers of Apartamento (okay, they e-mailed us to clear this up: they are different people. But to be fair: both mags share a similar look, the same design studio and some of the same contributors) about, you guessed it, plants. Lucky Peach is a new collaboration between McSweeney’s and chef David Chang (the man behind the Momofuku empire and who notably managed to use variations on the word “fuck” 24 times when he was profiled by The New Yorker) featuring writing from Anthony Bourdain among others.

In case you missed out the first time around, we also managed to get some more copies of Lula and we’re still unpacking everything, so there’s bound to be other great titles hitting the shelves later today. Stay tuned!

“Full disclosure. I don’t really know a lot about photography. I have no idea what the hell an ISO is, wouldn’t use film if you paid me and think the manual settings on my camera were created by the devil to make life difficult.”

So begins a note from the editor prefacing Take a brand new photography magazine published out of Sydney from the guys behind the illustration mag EMPTY and the Semi-Permanent design conferences. He continues,

“What I am though is a total groupie of photographers and their work. Like many people I have spent years flicking through the pages of countless photography books. Staring slack-jawed with amazement at images of oustanding beauty, at moments of time captured by individuals whose courage and talent I remain in awe of.”

Off to a pretty good start then, eh?

Similar in format to Monster Children, Take features 111 pages of stunning photography from the Magnum reportage style of Adam Ferguson to Boogie’s gritty dispatches from urban slums across the globe, commercial fisherman/photographer Corey Arnold’s photos from the high seas and just about everything in between.

Available in our Australian stores now, in NZ next week.

Hunter S. Thompson once famously said, “The magazine business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs.”

Okay, okay, he was actually talking about the music business but there are times when we’re convinced that this analogy could apply equally to the vagaries of the mag distribution game.

Now, don’t confuse the industry with the magazines: we love the mags, but we utterly loathe the endless hoops that we need to jump through to get to them.

There are times when we have encounters with our wholesale suppliers that leave us utterly speechless at their variable levels of competence. On some days we’ll receive a random delivery of 250 copies of a single magazine when we have explicitly asked for none (this happened yesterday) and others when we’ll ask for 100 copies and receive… twelve.

We were at the receiving end of some more logistical hijinx this morning when we discovered that instead of the many hundreds of copies of Lula that we’ve taken for previous issues (we tell them that we’ll take as many as they can get us) we’d only been allocated a tenth of our normal supply. Thankfully, dealing directly with the publisher in the UK overnight resulted in a further 100 copies being sent our way.

Funnily enough, dealing directly with publishers seems to be hassle free – dealing with distributors is anything but. We’re sure they’re trying their hardest, but given the well documented woes that the printing and publishing sector is currently undergoing, a supremely inefficient distribution model is about as helpful to all concerned as a kick in the crotch.

If you happened to have dropped by any of our stores in the days following a Lula delivery, you’ll understand what a massive deal this is for us. This mag is a genuine blockbuster. Usually, we get so many copies that we’ll be cramming them anywhere they will fit… stacking copies on top of shelving units, in stairwells, cleaning out storage cupboards so we can ram a few more in and for a few days, we’re bursting at the seams with Lula and then just as quickly… they’re all gone.

So, what does this mean for Lula fans?

If you already subscribe, don’t worry! We’ve ensured that we have copies beyond the store allocation to make sure that you’re covered.

If you’re not a subscriber, then the best way to ensure that you’ll get a copy is to subscribe or pre-order online and we’ll post you out a copy as soon as they come in. If you’re happy to wait until late-July or even early-August, we’re hoping to get some more copies then. Fingers crossed.

I had a call from a journalist at The Age this morning asking for comment on the issue of Andrej Pejic’s Dossier magazine cover—which, to be honest, was the first I’d heard of the issue. We normally sell anywhere between one and five copies of Dossier in each of our stores. It’s a great magazine with a lot of promise, but hardly a blockbuster title as far as we’re concerned.

If you haven’t been following the news, Pejic is a Bosnian-born, Melbourne-raised male model who looks not so much “androgynous” as much as he looks downright feminine. To put it into perspective, in January, Jean Paul Gaultier employed Pejic to walk down the catwalk at his Paris Fashion Week womenswear show… in a wedding dress.

To say that this bloke looks like a lady would be a massive understatement.

The photo on the cover of the latest edition of Dossier shows him topless, looking characteristically feminine—he has hips and a stomach that resemble those of a woman and rather than the bulging pectorals common to male models, he has what could be the breasts of any starved catwalk waif.

A fair bit of controversy has erupted as Barnes & Noble and whatever’s left of Borders in the US have forced the publisher to provide them with their copies wrapped in black plastic, despite being made aware that Pejic is male.

Many of today’s news reports have portrayed Dossier as a victim of bullying by these giants of US magazine retail, which is a perspective that we can only call hopelessly naive. Taking an overtly feminine model and shooting him in such a way that—to anyone who doesn’t follow the ebbs and flows of the fashion world—looks precisely like a topless, small breasted women was meant to gain them some attention and it has obviously been successful.

And for what it’s worth: of course, we won’t be following suit.

Unlike Barnes & Noble and Borders, we don’t have right wing lobby group loonies to contend with and we can freely sell magazines with bare breasts on their covers. Regular readers may recall that we were one of the few places in Australia where you could buy the issue of Monster Children with Hedi Slimane’s topless Kate Moss photo and certainly the only place to buy it without a sticker covering the offending nipple.

Nipples: we’ve got nothing against ‘em.

Alongside titles like T-World and Frankie and Wooden Toy—all independently published labors of love, all getting off the ground at around about the same time that we were in the mid-2000s—call it nostalgia, but these mags all hold a small place in our heart.

If you’re not familar with it, the Dumbo Feather formula is a simple one: find some really fascinating people and invite them to tell their stories. It’s a dense, engaging read that begs you to sit down and spend a couple of hours slowly soaking it in.

When founder and editor Kate Bezar sold up and moved home to her native New Zealand last year, we really wondered what might happen to the magazine. Well, we were pleasantly surprised late last month when we discovered that Dumbo Feather has been handed over to very capable hands of incoming editor Patrick Pittman and has been re-launched with a great new look (with—it has to be said—a stylistic tip of the cap to our favourite interiors mag).

In a neat twist of the format, Kate Bezar herself is interviewed in the new issue, talking about the origins of the magazine (“I basically conjured up my dream job and made it happen”), neatly handing it over and closing her chapter at the helm of this fantastic little mag. Available now.

Except for one big difference: it seemed like everyone was suddenly riding bikes!

Whether repairing old Dutch-style frames they had bought off eBay or buying brand new fixies from the local cycle shop, everyone I knew appeared to be simultaneously re-discovering the joy of travelling on two wheels. And Melbourne isn’t alone in this… from Perth to New York to Paris, all things bike related are undergoing a massive renaissance right now.

Springing up to fill the corresponding magazine shaped void is Treadlie, one of our favourite new mags. Published by the same folks as Green magazine, Treadlie is—admittedly, despite the odd smattering here and there—a cycling magazine for people that wouldn’t be caught dead in lycra. Unlike the other cycling titles on our shelves, this mag is more about the joy of cruising down a hill on your ten speed than it is about how to whittle another few grams off your carbon fibre racer.

Issue #2 contains reports on a fixed gear Nullarbor crossing, bikes made from bamboo, Japanese bike manufacturer Tokyo Bike plus all kinds of other wonderful two wheeled bits and pieces.

One of my favourite little touches is that the contributor’s page eschews the customary mugshot in favour of a rider’s-eye-view of each contributor’s various bikes.

Love it! Available in our Australian stores now.

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!