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!

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.

We’ve been fielding lots of inquiries recently as to the whereabouts of the latest issue of Apartamento.

And frankly, we’ve been wondering a bit ourselves!

The bad news is that there’s been some sort of a mix-up that has delayed their shipment to this side of the world. The good news is that we’re on the case and doing our best to get these in as soon as we possibly can.

We still don’t have a firm date as to when we can expect to take delivery of the latest issue of the world’s favourite ‘everyday interiors’ mag, but rest assured… we’ll be shouting it from the rooftops as soon as they come in.

When Ralph magazine got the chop earlier this month, it gave us cause to think about the supposedly ever more loudly chiming death knell of mainstream print media and the way it’s often portrayed in the media at large.

We’re getting pretty used to hearing about magazines shutting their doors or turning their physical doors into… digital doors. If some of the pundits are to be believed, paper is so passé that we will soon be wiping our arses with a new device called the iPoo.

Yes, it is true that a bunch of magazines are closing down, but it this unusual?

If we really wanted to examine the health and desirability of print, wouldn’t we want to look at “net closures” meaning closures minus new magazine launches? And what if we found that new magazine launches were also accelerating? Perhaps, our take on the death of print might be somewhat different. Perhaps the real story is not so much the death of print, but an acceleration of the natural life cycle of your average magazine.

That said, this wouldn’t be such an interesting story now, would it. Therefore, why are we not at all surprised that while Ralph is closing, no one has mentioned the launch of a new Aussie lads mag called Apollo.

When discussing Ralph’s closure in The Age, a representative of ACP was paraphrased as attributing its demise to a shift in the tastes of young men.

However, with the first issue of Apollo now on shelf, flicking through its pages is a veritable treat for your average fan of lads mags. Not that we would know, of course, the male contingent of mag nation’s staff are way too culturally refined and intellectual to check out those gorgeous Apollos Sirens.

And we really are interested in the articles such as those on Bear Grylls (and yes, he is covered and blood and eating the possibly still beating heart of some kind of wild animal), the Red Bull Air Race and Wolfmother. Ok, so we did linger over the bikini clad babes too. Which is possibly an indication that the tastes of young men (or older men for that matter!) don’t appeared to have changed very much at all…

We could debate whether Apollo will succeed or not, but that is not the point of this post.

Anecdotal evidence (and we see it more than anyone else) tells us that new magazines are being born faster than ever before. Yes, some mags are going to disappear, but even really popular mags have suffered this fate in the past. Anyone remember a wee little mag called The Face?

R.I.P Ralph. And welcome to the world, Apollo. We hope you’ll be on our shelves for many years to come!