9 really, really big magazines
There is something imposing about a magazine so big you have to sit down to properly read it. The Stack shelves are dotted with these unusually massive creations, popular with publishers perhaps because they encapsulate something about the spirit of indie publishing: its playfulness and its commitment to the joy of actually holding something in your hands, as well as its relative indulgence (who can truly say they need to make, or own, a magazine as big as a broadsheet newspaper? It’s all about pleasure.)
Below we’ve rounded up some of our favourite XXL magazines on the newsstand. Scroll down to see some of the boldest and most experimental titles being made today.
A whopping 33.5cm × 23.5cm, Marvin is a music title from Marvin Scott Jarrett, who founded RayGun in 1992, and Nylon in 1999. The latest issue, Marvin’s second, has Playboi Carti on the cover and features interviews with Futura and Nigo. Taglined ‘The Rebirth of Print’, Marvin is left purposefully unbound. That way, as Jarrett explained in an interview on the Stack site last year, readers can easily slip their favourite pages out and tack them up on the wall. Every spread doubles as an enormous poster.
In the context of a politically charged agenda and an economic crisis in Turkey that has made it difficult for many publications to buy paper, Istanbul-based 212 has been releasing (enormous) issues since 2012. At 28cm x 38cm, the outsize pages are a perfect canvas for 212’s impressive roster of contributors and interviewees, who have included David Lynch and Isabel Allende. In the latest issue (no.11) the standout interview is with the artist David Shrigley, whose joyful, funny artworks are perfect at this scale.
Objection is a new interiors magazine designed as an antidote to the Instagram feed. One way it subverts the online experience is by its physicality; the magazine has been left unbound, which means it has a tendency to literally fall apart as you are turning the (very large) pages. The first issue is all about the living room, which used to be called ‘the death room’ in the West, because it was the place families would lay out their dead for mourners to come and pay respects. One brilliant photo shoot is devoted to the ashtray, which Objection calls the ‘disappearing object’, as it is so rarely seen in living rooms today. Seeing ashtrays blown up to this size feels weirdly risqué.
Buy Objection in the Stack shop
More a coffee table book than a magazine, the heft and the bulk of Perfect — which is headed up by the legendary stylist and ex-editor-in-chief of Love magazine, Katie Grand — is deeply satisfying. The intention behind the project, according to the editor’s letter, is to “take the format of the magazine and elevate it from disposable paper commodity to a desirable object that satisfies the senses fully”. While some of the written editorial is a little patchy, where Perfect does deliver full sensory satisfaction is in its lead fashion shoot, which is 58 pages long and features Kate Moss in a catsuit and latex hood.
Virtuogenix is a deliberately repellent fashion magazine, featuring lots of non-human models. Taglined “where fine art meets fashion”, in its best shoots, Virtuogenix creates whole alternative worlds designed to pastiche conventional femininity. We see impossibly beautiful computerised women wearing eerie gas masks, while other sims hoover while simultaneously doing ballet. The large-scale format makes the through-the-looking-glass effect all the more immersive.
Buy Virtuoogenix in the Stack shop
Satirical fashion magazine Buffalo rethinks its entire visual identity every issue; the ‘Holidays in Spain’ issue looks like a catalogue, and Buffalo’s latest, themed ‘Viral’, has been designed to look like a ring-binder. The size of the magazine, too, varies wildly between issues. Number 10 is perhaps Buffalo’s biggest ever. Themed ‘Unfinished’, the whole magazine is bound in what looks like white masking tape and speckled with post-it notes from the editors (the illusion is that this is a proof, of the kind Anne Hathaway was delivering Meryl Streep to sign off in The Devil Wears Prada). One of the most ridiculous features in this wonderful magazine is a “rare interview” with Angela Merkel, before she heads off “to her usual Summer holiday in South Tyrol”. The interview didn’t actually happen (no time?), so instead we are given 11 enormous blank pages and some Lorem Ipsum dummy text.
Victory is a sports photography magazine with an interest in unusual stories. One standout shoot in issue 18, for example, documents Mexico’s national sport charrería, played by women wearing the traditional dress of the Mexican revolution. Other highlights from Victory’s decade-long publication history include photographs of drag-queen-cum-WWE-wrestlers, ‘water jousters’, and images from a protection dog competition. The second-biggest magazine on our list, it is necessary to sit down if you actually want to be able to turn the pages.
Sex magazine Baron’s latest ‘Death Book’ — part of an ongoing series investigating the erotics of mortality — is riddled with bullet holes. Previous issues similarly draw attention to their existence as physical objects; the first death book came in a jet-black protective box, and Harley Weir’s special issue had a baby’s eye printed on the cover (the effect feels, counterintuitively, explicit). Part of Baron’s experimentation with the printed object is about size: issues are bigger than the average magazine, and much thicker. This makes the Bruce LaBruce issue particularly unsettling: many of the images inside show models spattered with blood.
Good Trouble is the broadsheet-sized title devoted to resistance, named for a phrase used by the veteran civil rights leader John Lewis, who has spoken of the need to get into some “good trouble” in order to make any difference. The latest issue, which is about climate change, is comprised of three separate papers plus a fold-out poster. The magazine is rigorous in its pursuit of change, but at the same time, joyful. One supplement, entitled ‘The Waste Land’, is photo-only, making the reading experience particularly inviting.
Buy Good Trouble in the Stack shop
