These are our brand new envelopes for sending out your subscriptions, featuring illustrations by our friends over at Alter (they won an ARIA for Cut Copy’s album artwork last year and are generally pretty awesome.)

To be honest, these envelopes aren’t exactly “new” but in the two-months-of-non-stop-frantic-ness that we call Christmas, we didn’t get a chance to blog about them sooner.

We’ve been thinking long and hard about the envelopes that we use to send out our online orders (in fact, we posted about this problem almost a year ago today) and we weighed up dozens of different options for this new iteration: PVC bags, stiff cardboard, Fedex style pounches, bubble wrap envelopes and all sundry of combinations of the above.

It was important to strike a fine balance between protecting the magazine (keeping it from getting both bent and wet), shielding it from the eyes of the potentially thieving public (this happens more than you’d think!), looking good and being environmentally responsible.

Our old waterproofing solution of wrapping magazines in sealable plastic pouches worked in the very early days our business when we were sending out just a trickle of magazines, but when you’re posting out tens of thousands of mags each year the environmental consequences of all that land fill became stunningly apparent. Biodegradable organic plastic substitutes are still way too expensive for prime-time, so we went with a lightly waxed card that we’ve subjected to a number of in-house ‘soak’ tests.

And we reckon it came up pretty well!

That said, mag nation envelope v2.0. is only the second stage of what will undoubtedly be a long evolution and right now it’s far from perfect: the seal doesn’t always stick as well as it should, the printer completely forgot to put in an opening tab (d’oh!) and some customers in the rainier parts of far-North Queensland have requested extra waterproofing.

But it’s definitely a good start.

We’re committed to improving and iterating this as we go—heck, Netflix changed their envelope more than ten times in their first five years.

Got any ideas about how we might improve these? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

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.

For a couple of years now, we’ve been kicking around the idea of making a newspaper of one sort or another.

A last minute decision (why do we always enter into these things at the last minute?!) meant that we spent a frenzied week of scanning, writing and layouting (with the help of our friend Thomas Williams at Hunt Studio and the guys at Alter who put together the illustration on the front after—an hour or two before the press deadline—we realised we hadn’t organised a cover) a 16 page newspaper of our own, called The Magazine Lover’s Guide to Christmas.

It’s a collection of lots of our favourite magazines, highlighting the really popular Christmas-type subscriptions across our entire range.

Eagle eyes will notice a few typos here-and-there… but despite the odd hiccup, we’re beaming with pride at our little Xmas newspaper. There are big stacks of these in all of our Australian stores right now, they’ll be available in our Auckland stores mid-next week and copies are being sent out with subscriptions* for the next month or so.

Don’t live near any of our stores? Drop us a line on info@magnation.com with the subject line “Wrap me in news”, including your address and we’ll drop one in the post for you.

* That is, the subscriptions that we send out. It’s a bit complicated but for most Australian magazines (i.e. the ones that you get wrapped up in plastic) they’re sent out directly by the publisher. The ones that come in a mag nation envelopes, well, they’re from us. We won’t be including newspapers with the former because that would be impossible, but we will be including them with the latter. Capische?

Cue the sound of tumbleweeds, ’cause Lordy Crikey Moses it’s been quiet around here. What’s been going on? Well, lots and lots of stuff. When you’re a business of our size (i.e. tiny) and you’re just a couple of people working on about a billion different things at any one time, to be honest, blogging is probably one of the first things to fall by the wayside when things get busy. Shouldn’t be the case, but it is.

So, what have we been doing? In a word: Christmas.

And maybe throw in another two words: Nation State.

Between launching our new online emporium for all things non-magazine (and I’m currently spending about half of each day picking, packing and posting orders of Moleskine diaries and Blackwing 602s and Lamy pens and so on) and preparing for the coming festive bonanza that is the yuletide season, we’ve hardly had time to scratch ourselves.

Hold tight, though, dear reader because we’ll be clogging up your RSS reader with details on all the best new magazines and such in no time again soon. We’ll also be unveiling something a little bit special that’s been demanding a lot of our time recently (small clue in the image above for the curious.)

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.

First things first: this post is really, really late. It was meant to be a celebration of Desktop’s 25th anniversary issue but between launching our new web store and preparing for Christmas (I know, it’s September… sickening, isn’t it?) we sorta kinda missed that issue and the next edition hit our shelves… today actually.

A quarter century in the publishing world is no mean feat and we’d like to offer a big congratulations to the team over at Niche Media.

But that being said… we’ve gotta admit, Desktop is not a mag that’s been one our big faves until, well, pretty recently actually. Before its re-launch earlier this year, Desktop really felt like a bit of a tired and shabby sight on our design shelves, rubbing shoulders with a gang of slick up-and-comers. In short, it struck us that it was a magazine struggling to make sense of just how it fit into the Internet age.

Indeed, many titles haven’t been able to make this transition at all! But since its re-launch in March under incoming editor Brendan McKnight, Desktop has metamorphasized from a title that seems threatened by the Internet… to one that complements it. And does so beautifully! Printed on a luscious paper stock (and believe me, if you like smelling magazines—and yes, I’m aware that this may just be me—you wanna get a serious whiff of this baby) and packed with incredible illustrations,  jawdropping photographic spreads and longform behind-the-scenes features… this is a magazine that makes a wonderful case for the future of printed media.

Looking ahead into the next 25 years, we’re really glad to have Brendan here tell us about his favourite mags. Viva Desktop!

1. It’s Nice That

I think It’s Nice That was one of the first magazines I purchased from mag nation when I returned to Melbourne after being abroad for four years. The name says it all really. Starting as a website and turning into tri-annual publication documenting the best bits (and more), It’s Nice That has some terrific content from all across this globe. The complimenting colours of each cover work quite nicely together on the bookshelf too.

2. Condiment

I’m a bit of a foodie, and Condiment is the perfect balance between food, culture, creativity and community. Proudly made in Melbourne, the publication makes us question the complexities and value of food. To quote the editors – “after all, it is we who are dependent on food, and not food that is dependent on us.”

3. Dumbo Feather

Another Melbourne-based mag, Dumbo Feather is where I go to be told a story about something and someone I didn’t know existed. A mix of visual storytelling with the written word, the recent redesign by Chase & Galley makes it even more of a pleasure to read.

4. Elephant

Magma books was one of my favourite stores when I lived in London, and so it was hugely exciting for a magazine to come out by the store’s owner, Marc Valli. Published by Frame, Elephant perfectly captures the richness and complexity of contemporary visual culture.

5. Heat

Yea, a bit of a curveball. A girl at a design studio I worked at in London used to get this every week, and so I’ll admit that I was partial to a weekly lunch-break read. Funnily enough, I actually had my photo once in Heat, in a voxpop spread where they asked 50 guys on the street about what underwear they prefer their girlfriends to wear. I like boys, so it was a bit of a laugh. I sent my mum a copy.

Many of you may have noticed that while we increasingly sell more and new different types of interesting stationery and things in our stores, we’ve pulled back from selling these kinds of things online.

The reason for this is really that our website is really a very complex beast: unlike most eCommerce sites, it’s custom built from the ground up, designed to sell magazines and to handle all the different vagaries of sending out your subscriptions.

Basically, this means that because or website is so good at selling magazines, it’s never been very good at selling things that aren’t magazines. With that in mind we’ve decided to launch a brand new online store to sell stationery and gifty things and other cool bits and pieces that we love, and stock in our physical stores. It’s called Nation State and we’d love it if you’d take a look!

So, if you’re looking for Lamy pens, designer masking tape, Scrabble mugs, Moleskines, Pantone notebooks or maybe wanna pre-order the 2012 Frankie Diary or check out the incredible Palomino Blackwing Pencil (recently back in production after going for stupid $$$ on eBay for years, this pencil was a favourite of early Disney animators) we reckon we’ve got you covered.

The site is just very new and we’re still ironing out the wrinkles – but we figured that the quickest way for us to fix these glitches was to get the site in the public eye. So, if you see a spelling mistake or a wrong product image or anything of similar ilk, please do let us know and we’ll happily reward your diligence with a $5 voucher. Any feedback, positive, or negative is very welcome. As we’ve mentioned on many previous occasions, we’re still a very small company, and marketing budgets are, well, non-existent. We’d appreciate any help in getting the word out there about our fledgling project. You can follow us on twitter here @nation_state.

And speaking of vouchers: for the next week only (update: extended on the 16/09/11 for another week!), use the code ‘NSTATE2′ at the checkout for a 25% discount on any order. Tell your friends!

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.