The magazine racks at bookshops are always enticing – the text and images on the covers of a lot of publications compete for attention and it’s not surprising that customers station themselves for quite awhile at the racks.
As a former magazine hound, I can tell you that it’s the cosmetics as much as the content that enthralls. There’s pleasure not just in making new discoveries about your surroundings, which can be as immediate as your living room and as expansive as the universe, but also in absorbing the colours, photos and layout of an article. Subjects are liberally spiced by magazine’s big injections of graphics and photos; science, economics, business, politics, all perk up when the writing is complemented by pretty pie charts and prepossessing tables.
I’ve dropped magazine reading for a number of years now, namely due to the steep prices of the magazines I would like to read, and the sheer volume of reading that I need to plow through already which makes magazines a guilty distraction.
Still, I haven’t gone cold turkey. Stores such as Reissued on the second floor of Amcorp Mall that offer older issues of international mags for RM9.90 each, make magazine reading lighter on the wallet. Slick, online versions of magazines are also an avenue to satisfy zine-lust (my vote goes to The National Geographic website for both content and visual stimulus). If you ask me though, online mags are not as satisfying as the real thing in your hands.
In terms of the real thing, the socio-literary Off The Edge, home-decor mags Haven (English) and Anjung Seri (Bahasa), as well as MPH’s lovely book mag, Quill, are my regulars. With our recent home move, a slew of other interior decor titles have found their way onto my bookshelf in the past year, supplemented on and off by Madam Chair, a big (in terms of size) refreshing publication for career women that unfortunately eludes a lot of bookstores’ mag racks.
I have recently added a new title to the list of regulars: Discovery Channel’s Magazine, a beautifully-produced magazine on science and nature, containing excellent articles on a diverse enough range of topics to appeal to eclectics like me. I’ve bought two issues and have been delightfully apprised of: termites, space travel, high-rise farming, the Baja Desert Race, Chinese navigation, the Sydney Opera House construction and – in the latest issue 5 – the not-quite-so-humble-after-all pencil.
The quality of writing in Discovery is excellent and the layout, graphics and photos make reading a visually immersive experience. Given the content repository of the Discovery Channel, of course, the depth and breadth of coverage should not be such a surprise. It also taps into the decades of magazine-publishing experience of that old reading favourite of many of us, Reader’s Digest. I hope the magazine retains its eclecticism and piquant design for the issues ahead.
It’s great that a magazine is launched when the industry as a whole is fighting a losing battle to remain relevant in the age of freely available dots and bytes. Perhaps in the not-so-distant future, and particularly so with ebook readers such as the lustworthy Amazon Kindle presently gaining ground, magazines will all migrate to the electronic form.
But until that time, the glossy, sometimes audacious covers, funky layouts, catchy titles, sharp writing and arresting photos of magazines still work their magic best through the print medium.
Filed under: At the Stores, Personal Note, Playing Favourites, Reads , discovery, magazines, reading
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