Interview: Jeremy Leslie, founder of magCulture

– by Ali Gitlow

Originally launched in 2006 as a blog, the magCulture site has become a hub for like-minded individuals to gather and worship at the altar of the well-made magazine. Posts include interviews with publishers and editors, reviews of newly-released issues, industry news and holistic coverage of particular publications’ graphic design over their lifespans. In early 2015 Jeremy realized that, with so much attention being paid to independent magazines, it was only a matter of time before someone in London opened a shop showcasing them. With such a good infrastructure and network built already through the site, he thought it’d be a real misstep to not just go ahead and open a brick-and-mortar space himself.

The Zetteler team sure are glad he did, as we love a good magazine and are thrilled to have the magCulture shop on our radar. To cross its threshold is to be faced with the stuff of a print geek’s dreams: row upon row of amazingly-produced mags, from biggies like Vogue, The Gentlewoman and Wallpaper* to smaller publications including American Chordata, Hello Mr and Perdiz, sitting besides each other, just waiting for readers to come take a look. We couldn’t resist asking Jeremy some questions about his transition from magazine obsessive to store proprietor:

It was my interest in music and, in particular, buying NME every week to keep in touch with what was happening. That was less about design and more about the actual content. This was the late ‘70s, early ‘80s. It wasn’t just pre-Internet, it was pre-mainstream culture paying any little iota of attention to rock music or anything else that was outside the mainstream. It was the only way you could find out about new records and who was playing in London that weekend. That was the first magazine I remember buying on a weekly basis, and going out of my way to get into a shop to pick it up on a Thursday and being disappointed if it wasn’t there yet. 

It’s easy, in retrospect, to join up the dots and make a nice, coherent story. But the reality of it was far from inevitable. It did happen gradually, it became more and more of a natural step. I realized around the beginning of 2015 that there was a groundswell of interest in independent magazines. I just felt with London not having a shop dedicated to those magazines, that someone was going to open that shop. I realized I was going to be so upset if that someone wasn’t me and magCulture. So I went for it and decided I’d do it before anyone else did. As it happens, Tyler Brûlé was thinking the same thing. He actually beat me to it in terms of his Kioskafé. It’s slightly different to what we’re doing, but nonetheless it has a similar ethos. He was thinking the same thing, and we both opened last year. Together, I think we signify something. 

I’m constantly going between them. Actually, it’s often that you’re dealing with the same thing, you’re just dealing with it in a different light. I’m often writing about, covering, or commissioning someone to write about a particular magazine and at the same time, I’m considering how many to stock. And at the same time, someone else is packing off copies to send in the mail. At the center of it all are the magazines so it’s not as complicated as it might appear, but there are many strands. It is sometimes a bit crazy to pull it all together. In the end, everything’s on the same site and at the same location here. Everything feeds everything, so it works quite well. 

The actual process of putting it together and overseeing the fit-out was part nightmare, part heaven. In the end, the bit I most enjoy is seeing all the magazines. However hard elements of it are in terms of business, every morning when I arrive here I look at the stock and think, ‘Yeah, that’s good, that means something.’ I see it through fresh eyes every morning. There’s a nice feeling of order to that. The best thing, actually, is seeing other people come in and spending a long time looking through them all and taking a pile of magazines and going home happy with them. 

We’ve got about 270 magazines in stock and it’s just not possible to write about them all. To put it another way, it would be possible but no one would read it! Even before I had the shop, we were getting so many magazines that we had to develop strategies to try and cover some of the good ones that, for whatever reason, couldn’t be squeezed into the schedule. We did a couple of features called ‘magRush’, where we published a magazine review an hour for 24 hours. That was great fun, but I don’t think many people paid attention! You look at 3 and then get over it. We do a monthly roundup where we try and cover everything we get sent, or at least everything we get sent that we think there’s something to say about. The reality is, we do maybe 6 or 7 posts a week. It’s not possible to cover them all which, in a sense of being complete about it is a shame, but you’d never get people to read the volume you’d have to write to cover them all.

Yes. Even before the shop, but even more now that the shop exists, we’re hearing about so many magazines that are either new or just been launched or that are wanting to be stocked. We could fill a space 3 times the size of the space we’ve got if we dropped any sense of curation or care. The magazines are there, but this is a selection. Even at 270, it’s a selection.

It’s an imperfect thing, but there’s two sides to it. One is the magazines that literally somehow technologically link print to digital through an app that scans pages, or that brings up other material, that kind of device. And then there’s magazines which have grown out of a website – so it’s a project that started up online and moved to print and they’ve had to adapt to print, but they’re not actually trying to technologically link the two. They’ve had to readdress how they present themselves to suit print, which is as much about that intersection as the literal technological intersection. 

Of the former, the one that springs to mind is a project called Look & Listen. It was an app that responded to pictures in the magazine with either video or sound, but it did it really neatly without making too much fuss or complication to it. On the latter example of more simply moving from one medium to the other, I think there’s a number of great examples. Things like Rapha have got loads of content online promoting their view that they want everyone to cycle, but also promoting their products. Their magazine Mondial is a very eloquent move from digital into print. The two back each other up perfectly. They’re doing their own things. And that, I think, is the most intelligent way to develop that. 

I’m sure there are many gaps, but the one that goes back to my first answer, the one that I experience most, is music. We have a number of people come into the shop and say, ‘What music magazines have you got?’ We’ve gone out of our way recently in response to that to get some music magazines. There’s The Wire, which covers the very leftfield avant-garde area, and it does a very good job at that. I like Pitchfork Review which is another example of a digital property going into print. The spinoff from that is a lovely piece of print that absolutely balances the website. It does interest me, but I think there’s space for more music mags. The huge quantity of art magazines and fashion magazines makes sense, given that that works very well and easily in print and is a very traditional form, in a way. It’s just surprising that, alongside that, you don’t get tons of music mags. 

Below 1: Lunch Lady, one of magazines of the week during February. 2: The shelves stacked full of magazines. 3: LAW, another publication to previously be named magazine of the month. 4: The MagCulture shop in Clerkenwell.