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A New Book Prophesies--and Celebrates--the Death of the Newsstand Magazine
By David Renard, et al.
Universe
Edition: paperback
It's apparent right away that The Last Magazine--all 13-by-10 inches and roughly one and a half pounds of it--doesn't take its title lightly. As David Renard, who is credited as sole author on the cover and spine but isn't the only writer in here by any means, puts it in his lead essay, "Over the next few years, mass-market [magazine] titles will follow the lead of newspapers, academic journals, business-to-business magazines, and newsweeklies and move to stanch their hemorrhaging circulation and revenues by more aggressively embracing digital delivery. . . . Paper-based periodicals that do persevere in North America and Europe will do so on a much smaller scale. . . . These will be the last printed magazines." You've heard of true believers? Renard is a true disbeliever, so much so that he boldfaces that last clause.
Who can blame him? Print media as a whole has been at a loss in the face of its electronic competition. For the past decade, big-budget startups from major and minor magazine houses alike have dropped like subscription inserts, while an alarming number of print publications embraced the web both timidly and late, scrambling to start up blogs that are either misguided or wither from malnutrition within months. (Take it from a guy who barely updates his personal one.) Sure, you're always going to need something to read on the bus or the train, but increasingly, what there is to read has become less substantive, as magazines move to dumbsize content with shorter word counts, vapid listicles, bigger pictures of celebs, and increasing amounts of visual noise in the form of "entrance points" for casual readers to grasp onto--as if it weren't a rule that, editorially at least, magazines are better off cultivating an audience than chasing passers-by.
Still, The Last Magazine's prognostications are driven far more by commerce and technology than by matters of content. The most interesting of the eight essays here is British tech writer Nick Hampshire's "The E-Paper Catalyst," about the technologies that may render irrelevant definitions of--and differences between--glossy and newsprint. As technological gizmos decrease in size, e-readers (the device) and e-paper (the technology the devices use) are the next logical step--flexible, lightweight ("as thin and light as a copy of Newsweek," Hampshire writes), and sensitive to ambient light, meaning casually readable in a way that a laptop's LCD screen, lit from within and not paperlike from above, is not.
Hampshire notes that the e-reader's "combination of an electrophoretic frontplane and an organic electronic backplane . . . will be used in commercial displays from 2007 onward"--and guesses they'll be in widespread use by 2012. "In its docking stand, which is connected to your PC, the e-reader has been automatically downloaded with copies of the morning newspaper and a couple of magazines to which you subscribe. . . . [Y]ou know it will not be damaged if you drop it or sit on it, unlike your laptop PC."
Needless to say, this sounds a hair too good to be true, just like every other tech-based prediction ever--which doesn't mean it couldn't happen. Ditto Renard's proposition that what he refers to as "the stylepress"--artisan "high-end specialty titles," by big or small publishers, unbound to periodicity--will make up the bulk of the still-on-paper magazine industry in 20 years. Apparently this also means the actual style press--fashion magazines. If there's a logjam in the e-paper equation, it's that saturated color printing and oversized, glossy paper can do what an electronic screen simply can't. The fashion industry--and to a lesser degree the art industry, which doesn't sell nearly as many magazines--depends upon vivid representation; however good e-paper becomes, you can't tear out a photo from it and hang it on the wall. This must seem so obvious a truth that Renard doesn't mention it--instead, he offers a making-of essay by Rankin of U.K. style monthly Dazed and Confused that'll charm the magazine junkies (who else would pick up this book?) but doesn't offer much theoretically.
Soothsaying isn't The Last Magazine's focus so much as its excuse. As you might guess from the $45 price tag and oversize format, this is an art book, which helps explain why Steven Heller's essay, on independent magazines from Dada forward, rhapsodizes about the utterly unreadable rock mag Ray Gun--an early-'90s title, not '80s, as claimed. Heller is art director for The New York Times Book Review. No wonder he's so misty-eyed about a publication in which "page numbers were grotesquely blown up so that they were larger than the headlines and positioned in the middle of all the pages"--he must want to do the same thing every week of his life.
Still, it's disingenuous to wonder, as this book does in the preface of its "Design" chapter, "Why do magazines have to be designed for ease of use?" Here's why: Because that's the entire reason people like magazines. There's a line between sticking to your guns and being willful; magazines are a great art form because they suppose private obsessions can and should become shared knowledge, public information, common cause, by adding them to a canvas for a multiplicity of voices, however narrow their binding sensibility might seem. Great books are records of great ideas and stories, but a great magazine communicates the byways of a great community. There are many titles displayed in The Last Magazine that I greatly like--the late Zembla, a British attempt to create a literary magazine with the look and feel of a rock mag; the high-toned porn of Richardson--or am intrigued by unread, such as Yummy, a "junk food design magazine." But however stimulating this plethora is, as a group of margins without a center, it also feels a little sad.
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