It’s rolling round to the time of year again when the annual agIdeas conference takes place in Melbourne. Having had a look at the speaker lineup, we’re (as always looking forward) to being in attendance. Early bird tickets are still available  here.

We’ve also organised a poster competition with the good people at agIdeas, with the winners announced at the start of the conference , on the 29th of April. We’ve had more than a hundred entries already, and you can check them out here.

Check out the flip through of this year’s program below. If you dig it, you can download the real thing here.

Here’s a tasty treat for foodies! Put A Egg On It is a fanzine-inspired title from New York City that combines essays and articles about food alongside practical recipes.

It’s a decidedly unfrou-frou affair, however. The digest-sized green pages practically glisten with juices, and there’s even an 8 page photographic spread dedicated to “Messy Kitchens” (which made us feel virtuous by default. Good work, Put A Egg On It!)

Issue 6 is dedicated to the sandwich. A description of a lunchbox from 1909’s “The Girl Of Limberlost” sits cheek-by-jowl with a saucy cartoon entitled “Two Bourbon Street Strippers Sharing A Roast Beef Po-Boy, Dressed”. An article about a slaughterman’s assistant happily mixes with recipes for Chipotle Lentil Vegan Burgers and Lobster Roll With Old Bay And Celery.

This mag is about the joy of food, especially when shared with friends. It’s joyously messy and finger-licking fun. You’ll find it at all mag nation stores and online here.

Of late, we’ve been crazily busy preparing for the festive season ,and so, have been a little slack in getting some of our new arrivals on to the blog – so apologies if the news seems a little old!

The fifth issue of Kinfolk magazine hit our shelves a couple of weeks ago. This publication has really been one of the highlights of the past year, and we’ve really enjoyed introducing it to our customers.

Issue 5 features the mag’s trademark section splits –  entertaining for one, entertaining for two, and entertaining for a few. Highlights include Foraged Herbal teas,  The Perfect Cup of Coffee, (featuring Matt Perger from one of Melbourne’s premier cafes, St. Ali’s), Herb Drying, a Homage to Cheese, Sharing Pesto, and last but not least, a recipe for Pear Tartlets.  Selected spreads below. Copies are available in our stores or online.

Another perennial  favourite, the Frankie Diary, has finally landed in our stores. The 2013 version of the Frankie Diary is back and looking better than ever. As you can see from the very, very, big picture above, the diary is covered in its trademark linen, this year in a lovely rust colour.

The diary is divided in to 4 sections; the first is a 2013-2014 mini calendar:

…followed by a monthly scheduler, helping you to easily view and plan the year’s events:

The body of the diary features each week laid out horizontally across a 2 page spread. Each month is surrounded by a unique border.

The rear of the diary is home to what I like to call the VFH (Very Frankin’ Handy) section. Apologies for the Dad joke…just couldn’t help myself. This section contains a bunch of useful stuff: to-do lists, DIY calling cards, a birthday scheduler, an address book, and a super sweet expandable pocket for all those bits-and-pieces that you’ll accumulate throughout the year.

Anyway, my laborious descriptions really don’t do this beautiful diary justice. It is available for purchase in our stores or online via our dedicated stationery and gift website, Nation State.

N.B: Last week, in our post on the 2013 Mi Goals Diary, we should have mentioned the imminent barrage of blog entries highlighting 2013 Diaries. Please accept our humble apologies if, unlike us, diaries don’t make you a little excited (in an entirely appropriate manner). 

Every now and then,we hear about the launch of a new publication that receives an instantaneous groundswell of almost fanatical support. Examples of such publications in recent times have been David Chang’s Lucky Peach, Tyler Brule’s Monocle, Kinfolk and Apartamento. Sometimes, this demand is partially driven by the identities behind the publication – as was the case with Monocle and Lucky Peach ,whilst in other instances, the demand stems and grows solely from communities who are passionate about the subject matter of that particular publication.

The CR Fashion Book definitely falls into the former category. For the past couple of months, we’ve been fielding numerous requests in store, via email and all avenues of social media for this title. For the non-fashion acquainted out there, the CR in CR Fashion Book refers to Carine Roitfeld – who was, until very recently, at the helm of Vogue Paris. After 10 years at Vogue, Roitfeld decided to start her own fashion publication from scratch, and the CR Fashion Book is the fruition of her planning. In her own words, ‘Fashion is an industry built on the excitement and energy of youth, and CR is where you’ll see new talent first. I’ve edited the magazine to be a who’s who of the next generation, as well as an ode to fashion’s legends and icons. Created with humor, joy, grace, and always a dash of irreverence.’

Both covers as well as some images are included below. We’ve managed to  get our hands on some of the first copies to arrive in Aus and NZ. It is available for purchase right now from our Newtown store in Sydney, or online here. We expect to have copies in our Melbourne and NZ stores early next week (the week starting 1 October).

While we’ve been banging on about this for years, it was gratifying to see an article in this week’s Time Magazine discussing the ways in which print media and the Internet are joining forces to create a wonderful new galaxy of magazines that exist in concert with—or sometimes because of—the Internet, rather than competing against it.

The Internet has been cast as print’s enemy, stealing readers and advertisers. But the digital revolution has also produced a generation of print publishing companies that is younger than Facebook. “With a few grand you can set yourself up with a digital camera, a decent computer and some software, and you’re able to make something using the same equipment as Vogue,” says Jeremy Leslie, creator of the magCulture blog and magazine curator for Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center’s current exhibition “Graphic Design: Now in Production.”

Pick up a copy in-store or, uh, check it out online.

One summer morning in 1958, a photographer working for Esquire magazine named Art Kane gathered together a vast group of jazz musicians on the street in New York’s Harlem for a photograph that would be published in the magazine’s January 1959 issue.

From Count Basie to Thelonious Monk to Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins and Gene Krupa over 57 musicians in total were represented in a photograph that would become emblematic of the golden age of jazz and go on to inspire the 1994 documentary A Great Day in Harlem.

Leafing through the pages of the brand new New York edition of T-world: The Journal of T-shirt Culture, it struck me that this new issue of the world’s only T-shirt journal sets out to do something equally ambitious and era-defining.

Across 196 lavishly designed pages, the gang at T-world seek to capture the essence of NYC streetwear circa-2011… visiting the people behind labels like Alife, Married to the Mob, Milkcrate, ONLY, the omniscient LA-based Hundreds (and their newly opened NYC store) as well as taking in pioneers like Ricky Powell (immortalised in an early Beastie Boys lyric, not suitable for a family friendly blog such as ours) and Milton Glaser (yes, the designer behind the ‘I Heart NY’ logo).

It’s like your streetwear crazy best friend went to New York, interviewed all the key players, took a bunch of amazing photos and truly surveyed the whole scene and wrapped it up in a lavishly hardbound book format magazine… just for you!

Still just $20 (plus postage for online orders, of course).. this is an absolute beauty and truly something special. Available online and in-store now.

Earlier this week, in an article in The Age the head of the Australasian Bottled Water Institute called the decision by the Victorian College of Arts to ban the sale of water on campus…wait for it… “stupid.”

Hold on a minute! Bottled Water Institute?! Is that like one of those shonky research bodies put together by the tobacco companies to promote the health benefits of smoking? Sure as heck sounds like it.

Anyway, we digress.

”If they are serious about reducing their environmental footprint, they probably need to ban soft drinks and coffee and just about every other commercial beverage other than bottled water, which has one of the lowest environmental footprints of any beverage,” Mr Parker said.

Unbelievable! We just have to call bullshit on this one. Sorry mate… unlike water, coffee and soft drinks don’t flow freely from the tap.

A quick little scout around The Age’s own website reveals a number of facts:

• Bottled water is more expensive than petrol; if you could turn petrol into water, you could make money.
• The total amount of energy required for every bottle of water is equivalent, on average, to filling a quarter of the bottle with crude oil.
• In addition to the water in bottles, twice as much water is used in the production process. Which means: every litre sold represents a jaw dropping two litres of water used to bring that water to market.

We’re so fortunate in this part of the world that we have really high quality, pure drinkable H2O piped to all of our houses and offices that it just seems ridiculous that we’re bottling water in crappy, thin plastic bottles riddled with Bisphenol A (really, it’s bad news!), carting them around in trucks, buying them at a ridiculous mark-up before at best recycling or at worst turfing them into landfill or the ocean… when we could simply be re-filling our own bottles!

We’re happy to announce, then, that we’ve just begun stocking the JoinThePipe water bottles in our AU stores.

Recently introduced to Australia by two of the guys that brought us Movember, it’s a worldwide initiative started in a Holland a couple of years ago that’s founded on the simple ideas that:

• Bottled water is wasteful.
• We have great tap water almost everywhere in the developed world.
• Billions of people in the Third World have limited access to drinking water and that’s a terrible problem facing humanity.

The Join The Pipe project neatly takes these three ideas and overlaps them like some kinda freaky Venn diagram: by selling a range of six great looking, functional water bottles and establishing a network of refilling points across the globe we can eliminate all the waste associated with bottled water and from each $29.95 water bottle sold we make a $7.50 donation to supporting water projects in the Third World.

And the bottles themselves? They’re super cool. Created in collaboration with the Dutch design agency DwarsOntwerp, they come in six different varieties from the straight-up-and-down pipe style to the freaky deaky Y joiner pipe. They’re BPA free, impact resistant and dishwasher safe and they look great.

We’re now selling them in all our Australian stores (and online at Nation State) and if you bring one in—or, indeed, any water bottle—we’ll happily fill them up for you!* We’re also pleased to say that we’re rolling back the sale of bottle water from our stores—as of today, there will be no bottled water sold in our Elizabeth Street stores and the others will soon be following suit.

Bottled water sucks. Buy a re-useable bottle, fill it up and help build wells in the Third World.

* With the exception of our Sydney store in which we don’t have proper plumbing. It’s a long story.