Mr. Magazine

From Sweden comes this new quarterly “Bookazine” part book, part magazine. Yet, the whole is much larger than the sum of the two parts. The magazine is bilingual, Swedish and English, and is aimed at the cream of the crop of audiences worldwide. The price tag is a hefty one: 22 Euros in Europe and $28 in the USA. I picked up the first issue on the stands in Helsinki where I am keynoting today the Finnish Periodical Publishers Association conference. Loft’s founder Mikael Becker is a mutli-tasker. He writes in the first issue, “I created the Loft concept, which currently consists of Loft Bookazine, loftcard, the Loft television series and the Loft website. Right now I feel proud, happy and exhausted.” And can you blame him? It took him a year to get the whole concept of Loft refined “like polishing a diamond.” This boutique magazine continues in the latest trend of other boutique magazines from the Nordic countries using their own language and English as a second language in the magazine to create that instant international flavor and flair to the magazine. Loft has been able to do so ever so graciously. The picture above is from the loftcard web site. A very good example of what some like to call “publishing 360.”