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Like The Wind Magazine: A Phenomenal Publication Crosses The Atlantic To Launch A USA Edition. The Mr. Magazine™ Interview with Simon Freeman, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief.

June 29, 2026

Once in a blue moon you receive a magazine that you can’t put down until every page, every picture, every illustration is looked at, time after time, and it gives you the feeling of satisfaction, relief, and an emotional energy to continue enjoying life, the good life.

Last month I received the first issue of the USA edition of the British magazine Like The Wind, and it was exactly what I wrote about in my first paragraph of this blog: beautiful, comforting, soothing, and all encompassing with every page I turned, and I did turn every single page from cover to cover. Mind you, I am not a runner…

I loved the magazine so much that I reached out to its co-founder Simon Freeman in the United Kingdom and requested an interview about this phenomenal magazine that just launched an American edition after launching a Japanese one two years ago, and are ready to launch a French and German editions later this year.

Simon was as passionate about the magazine, ink on paper, running and the human spirit that goes with it, and all things “Like The Wind,” as the magazine itself.

So please enjoy my interview with Simon and read all about the launch story of Like The Wind in the UK, Japan, and the USA.

But first the soundbites:

On what is Like The Wind selling: “what we are selling is 20 minutes with a cup of coffee, reading something not on a screen. That’s actually what we’re selling, is just a moment of calm, sitting with a print magazine, just taking a moment to relax and enjoy yourself.”

On the goal of the magazine: “We want to continue to create that sense of calm around the experience of reading the magazine.”

On the uniqueness of the USA edition: “The US edition now uses US spelling. And some of the stories that are in the US edition are unique only to that North American edition.”

On expending into global markets: “It’s about trying to kind of create a magazine that is as high quality and as enjoyable a reading experience as possible for a local audience.”

On his love for the magazine format: “I just love the format of a magazine. I love the fact you read a story. It’s done. You put it down. You don’t have to remember where you are. You pick it up the next time you read another story. I love the long form journalism. I love the way they feel in my hand.”

On the decision to launch the magazine: “Very famously in my world, (my wife Julie) said, we should give it a go. How hard can it be? And that was honestly how it started.”

On choosing the name Like The Wind: “We need a magazine that is evocative, and sort of inspirational. And I just remember we were just sat thinking about it, and Julie said, Like The Wind.”

On why the word run is not in any article title: “We work hard to not include the word run or running in the titles of any of the stories. So when people go to the contents, we don’t have the word run or running in the titles of any of the stories.”

On the usage of social media to advertise: “It’s ironic and interesting. The world that we live in today, outside of social media, it’s hard to imagine how you can reach people with a new title. It’s difficult to know.”

On the status of magazines today: “They’re not the center of culture anymore. They’re very peripheral. And people don’t go looking for them.”

On their unique selling point: “We are selling a product that encourages people to spend half an hour a week or an hour a week off their screens.”

On the difference between ink on paper and digital screens: “The screen is so flat, whatever screen you’re on, whether it’s a laptop or a phone or whatever, it’s just this two-dimensional surface, right? There’s no texture. I love the idea of embossing the cover or foil blocking or like trying to put in rougher paper or smoother paper, because what you’re doing is you’re activating a whole another sense, which is the feel of the thing in your hands.”

On using different types of paper in the magazine: “We put different types of paper in because we can, because it’s something that print allows you to do that digital doesn’t.”

On AI when it comes to content: “I don’t believe that AI has the capacity to be truly creative. So, when it comes to the art, the imagery, the words in the magazine, the editing, the sub editing, I feel that that’s got to be a human, because they bring a creative sensibility that a machine, at least currently, can’t replicate.

I want to read something that’s come from somebody’s heart. I want something that has come from their soul. And I need to know, I need to feel that it’s come from that.”

On going for a run: “It’s amazing, the feeling in your lungs when you finish and the fact that your legs are burning a little bit. It’s all very visceral and analogue. There’s no digital version of that.”

On the importance of diversity in the magazine: “I think there is a continual need and drive to diversify the voices that are telling stories about running.”

On what keeps him up at night these days: “We are pushing our business to the limits and that is causing a lot of financial stress.”

And now for the lightly edited Mr. Magazine™ Interview with Simon Freeman, Publisher and Editor in Chief, Like The Wind magazine:

Samir Husni: Congratulations first on the launch of the US edition of Like the Wind. I know that you’ve launched an edition in Japan and you’re getting ready to launch one in France and one in Germany, and you’ve been publishing the magazine in England for 12 years or so. Why this global expansion in print in a digital age?

Simon Freeman: Oh, that’s such a good question. It’s a two-part answer. The first part is that three years ago, my wife and I (Julie and I are the co-founders of Like The Wind), were approached by, by a book publisher to work on a book with them.

We said, yeah, absolutely. We love working on it. It was a great book.

It was good fun. What we didn’t understand is that with book publishing, the publisher will then sell the rights to different language versions of the book. We didn’t know that.

So there’s a German edition and a French edition. There’s an Italian edition of this book that we wrote, which is cool. Then, one day the publisher rang us and said, we are selling the rights to a Japanese publisher, but the Japanese publisher has asked whether he can be put in touch with you directly because he wants to talk to you about the magazine.

We were like, sure, sounds cool. So, we got on a call with this guy Mr. Kiyo Fujishiro. He said, I have this business where I translate English language running books into Japanese, which is fine, but I love the idea of a magazine because a magazine is a regular thing you do three, four times a year.

How many copies do you sell in Japan? he asked. We said, none, like 20 copies or something. It was like nothing. He said, could we talk about me buying the license to publish the magazine in Japanese? And in the end, the way things worked out, instead of paying us for the license, why don’t we go into a joint venture? So Kiyo basically takes the English language version, the PDF, and he picks the stories that he wants, he translates them.

Obviously, he’s got, when he started, 46 editions to go back through, none of which had been seen in Japan because we weren’t selling any copies. So, he just picks the stories that he wants, translates them into Japanese, and then he adds probably about 20-25% Japanese stories. That was how Japan started.

What the Japanese edition explained to us was that what we are selling is 20 minutes with a cup of coffee, reading something not on a screen. That’s what we’re selling, is just a moment of calm, sitting with a print magazine, just taking a moment to relax and enjoy yourself. So, the French and German editions that we’re launching this year are based on the same principle, which is, if you’re a native French-speaking person, reading a magazine in English is not as relaxing as reading the stories in French.

We want to continue to create that sense of calm around the experience of reading the magazine. The US edition is slightly different. Basically, it became apparent that printing all of the editions in the UK and then shipping to the US as our US audience was growing fast was, from a sustainability point of view, not great, and from a cost point of view, not great.

We reached a point where we were able to go to a printer in the US and say, well, can we afford to print the copies that we require for the US audience in the US? It will reduce our transport costs, it reduces the amount of time, it’s much better for the environment. So we’ve hit a number that’s allowed us to start working with a US printer. There is an element of the same idea, which is, because we’re doing two different PDFs, they don’t have to be the same.

The US edition now uses US spelling. And some of the stories that are in the US edition are unique only to that North American edition.And I’ll give you an example of why I think that’s important.

There’s a thing in US sport called NIL, Name Image Licensing. Outside of the US, no one knows what that is. It makes no sense at all.

So, if we’re writing a story about NIL, for everyone else in the world, we must explain what NIL is in the story. But the US audience, we don’t need to do that. So, it means that we can now slightly tailor the reading experience to the local audience.

And it’s the same the other way around, right? There might be, a concept that is commonly understood in France. But for the US audience, we need to just explain what it is a little bit because it’s foreign. It’s about trying to kind of create a magazine that is as high quality and as enjoyable a reading experience as possible for a local audience.

That’s why we’re doing it.

Samir Husni: What is the genesis of Like the Wind?

Simon Freeman: When we launched the magazine 12 years ago, I was much more a runner than I am now.

The media options in the UK at the time were very, what I would call, functional. So, the magazines that you could buy were full of training tips and nutrition articles and stuff like that. I already had a coach.

I was trying to break two and a half hours for the marathon. I was running 80, 90 miles a week. So, I felt like I didn’t need the advice in terms of how to run.

But there were this whole bunch of magazines. Rouleur is a good example in cycling. There was another cycling magazine called The Ride Journal, which doesn’t exist anymore.

The Surfer’s Journal. And I was buying these magazines. And so my wife and I were running a route around the Mont Blanc called the TMB over three days.

One of the things we were talking about was Julie was saying to me, I see that you’re buying these surfing magazines and these cycling magazines, but you don’t cycle and you don’t surf. So why are you buying them? And I said, well, I just love the format of a magazine. I love the fact you read a story. It’s done. You put it down. You don’t have to remember where you are. You pick it up the next time you read another story. I love the long form journalism. I love the way they feel in my hand.

I was already at that point spending, goodness knows, 12, 13, 14 hours a day on a screen for work. So, I love the idea that when I wasn’t at work, I could just sit and read something in ink on paper. And Julie said to me, well, why does this magazine not exist in running? And I said, I don’t know.

Julie said, well, we should give it a go. Very famously in my world, she said, we should give it a go. How hard can it be? And that was honestly how it started.

We were doing that run around the Mont Blanc in the September, and we launched issue one the following February. We had no idea what we were doing. I remember Julie going on to Google and saying, how do you design a magazine? We quickly got support.

The team at Rouleur were amazing. They’re based in London. They invited us as soon as they saw what we were doing. They invited us down and said, how can we help? Is there any advice that you need? Other people helped quickly that we emailed them and said, we’re trying to launch this running magazine. How do we do it? So, it’s a nice community of people that are happy to support, especially if you’re making a magazine not in their sector. You know, I’m sure if we’ve been launching a cycling magazine, Rouleur might not have been quite as helpful.

Samir Husni: How did you choose the name Like The Wind?

Simon Freeman: We came up with the name, and again, all credit to Julie, she was the person that came up with the name. The reason we came up with the name was that we didn’t want it to have the word run or running in it. Because all the other magazines were Men’s Running, Women’s Running, Runner’s World, Running Fitness.

We’re like, we need a magazine that is evocative, and sort of inspirational. And I just remember we were just sat thinking about it, and Julie said, Like the Wind. Interestingly, we do sometimes get people who will send us a message and they say, I’ve just discovered Run Like The Wind magazine.

It’s not Run Like The Wind, it’s just Like the Wind. We work hard to not include the word run or running in the titles of any of the stories. So, when people go to the contents, we don’t have the word run or running in the titles of any of the stories.

Samir Husni: How was the reaction for the launch of the USA edition?

Simon Freeman: It’s been amazing. It’s been really, positive. We’re fortunate in that we’ve been selling the magazine in the US almost since issue one, so 12 and a half years ago.

We already had an audience. What’s been interesting is that launching a US specific edition has given us a good reason to talk about the magazine beyond there’s another edition coming out. We can explain why we’re doing it.

It feels as though we reached far beyond our existing audience of subscribers. It’s good. There’s also, which I think is true, an element of collecting.

You mentioned earlier that you had a collection of magazines with first editions. There’s lots of people who’ve discovered Like The Wind at issue 37. And you know that there’s an element in many of their minds that they’re like I want the full collection.

So, launching Like The Wind USA issue one has again given us this opportunity to say, you can start from issue one, you can build this collection with us over the next decade or whatever.

Samir Husni: I’ve noticed you’ve been using social media to advertise the magazine.

Simon Freeman: Yes, it’s ironic and interesting. The world that we live in today, outside of social media, it’s hard to imagine how you can reach people with a new title. It’s difficult to know.

Sometimes I think to myself, well, how did people advertise magazines before social media? I think what’s happened, and I love learning about magazines, I love all sources of information about magazines. I think people would discover magazines on newsstands, right? And that doesn’t really exist anymore, or not in any meaningful sense. So that source of reaching people doesn’t exist.

Magazines, they’re not the center of culture anymore. They’re very peripheral. And people don’t go looking for them.

So, it’s not like people, when I was younger, magazines meant so much to me that I would go and seek them out. I really want a magazine about whatever this topic that I’m interested in. That doesn’t seem to happen so much anymore.

So, unfortunately, well, not unfortunately, the reality is that what people do is they go online and they look for, they search for running stories. We need to make sure that when they look for running stories alongside YouTube videos and books and whatever else, Like The Wind magazine is featured. We are selling a product that encourages people to spend half an hour a week or an hour a week off their screens. And we’re using those screens to advertise the product. What can you do?

Samir Husni: I noticed in the first issue, you use two different types of paper, the matte and the glossy. The reason behind that?

Simon Freeman: Well, again, there’s two reasons, really. One is because the photos fit beautifully on gloss paper. But I think the matte paper has a nice feel. So, it’s like, it’s nice to just have the photos really ping. It gives you that wow, they look sharp on gloss paper. It feels nice to hold a magazine that’s got lots of matte material in it.

Maybe, the other side of it, is because we can, because the screen is so flat, whatever screen you’re on, whether it’s a laptop or a phone or whatever, it’s just this two-dimensional surface, right? There’s no texture. I love the idea of embossing the cover or foil blocking or like trying to put in rougher paper or smoother paper, because what you’re doing is you’re activating a whole another sense, which is the feel of the thing in your hands, which the screen just removes all of that. We put different types of paper in because we can, because it’s something that print allows you to do that digital doesn’t.

Samir Husni: Speaking of digital, do you ever use AI?

Simon Freeman: We do. We are judicious in our use of it. When I’m doing an interview, I’ll sometimes use an AI tool to transcribe the audio file. There are certain things that we’re using it for in the kind of operational side, the backend, like managing subscriptions and things like that.

There are ways that we can use AI to ensure that we are using the data that we need to ship people’s copies in a way that is secure, but faster than us going through a spreadsheet. AI is a phenomenal tool to do something where there are very clear rules and structures to follow. It does it fast.

So, if you say I need you to transcribe this piece of audio, there’s not a lot of art in that. You’re looking for as accurate a representation of that audio file as possible in words. And if you can do it in 60 seconds while you make a cup of tea, and then you come back and it’s ready, rather than spending four hours with it in your ears, trying to transcribe it.

That’s an efficiency. I don’t believe that AI has the capacity to be truly creative. So, when it comes to the art, the imagery, the words in the magazine, the editing, the sub editing, I feel that that’s got to be a human, because they bring a creative sensibility that a machine, at least currently, can’t replicate.

I want to read something that’s come from somebody’s heart. I want something that has come from their soul. And I need to know, I need to feel that it’s come from that.

The other thing, of course, is that what we are publishing stories about is an inherently analogue activity. You can’t AI going for a run. I went out with my brother-in-law this morning for a run along the lakeshore here in Switzerland, with the wind in our hair.

It’s amazing, the feeling in your lungs when you finish and the fact that your legs are burning a little bit. It’s all very visceral and analogue. There’s no digital version of that.

It makes sense then that as far as possible, the storytelling bit should be from humans. If you think about publishing in the broader sense, I think information and maybe news is more under threat because an AI agent can pull information together quickly, more efficiently, potentially, than a human writer. But if you’re publishing what we’re writing, what we’re publishing, which is not informational, it’s inspiration, it’s entertainment, it’s ideas and concepts. That’s got to be a person, in my opinion.

Samir Husni: If it’s not on the web, if it’s print only, AI cannot touch or steal it, or come close to it.

Simon Freeman: I totally agree. It’s part of the joy. There’s a joy and a frustration in things that are not ubiquitous. You can’t have it. I’m sorry. You have to literally buy a physical copy and wait for it to arrive.

It’s amazing, the feeling in your lungs when you finish and the fact that your legs are burning a little bit. It’s all very visceral and analogue. There’s no digital version of that.

We will always publish stories that are written by people, honestly. I think that’s entertainment. People don’t want to go to an art gallery to look at art that’s been created by a robot. People don’t want to go to a rock concert to listen to music that’s been created by these robots.

Art forms, writing, art, fine art, music, you want to know that there’s been a sweaty, fallible human being kind of behind it, because I think that’s why we indulge in it.

Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical last questions, is there any question that I should ask you that I failed not to ask you?

Simon Freeman: I love asking that question. The question I would ask is, if I was asking myself this question is, how do we improve the storytelling that we’re doing in Like The Wind magazine? And to answer my own question, I think there is a continual need and drive to diversify the voices that are telling stories about running.

There’s this myth that running is this easily accessible, you just need a pair of shoes, and you can go for a run, and it’s not true. It’s really not true. I remember when we started, when I started gathering momentum, when we started the magazine, I was the editor originally, and it’s a complete joke because I didn’t know what I was doing, but I would be gathering stories, and you suddenly realize that if you are not an able-bodied, relatively wealthy white man, running is not universally accessible.

What we’re able to do with Like The Wind is to try and tell some of the stories of people for whom running is important, but it’s not ubiquitous. It’s not this easy thing. I remember there was a young man called Ahmed Arbery who was murdered whilst out on a run by some people who decided that he was running in the wrong place, and we had to respond to that, we had to do something about that. I was phoning friends of mine who are black and asking them about this sort of thing, and they were, the universality of their response, which is, it’s not safe for me to go running at night, or in this part of town, or whatever.

I was horrified, I mean, horrified. I was like, what are you talking about? Going out for a run? Surely, it’s just this universal human right. Or I remember talking to women, friends of mine, who would say, it’s annoying when the clocks change.

I remember saying to one of these women why? What’s the problem with the clocks changing? She said, well, I don’t feel safe running on my own after dark. I was like, that’s potentially half the human population. So, I think, the question I like being asked is, how do we make the magazine better? The answer is more diverse voices, more people who can share their experience of running.

I’ll tell you another quick story. We published 40 editions in 10 years, and the 41st edition, the first edition of our second decade, we decided that we would make it a women’s edition. So, we hired a woman called Amory Rowe, and she was the editor for that one edition. It was a fully female team, only female writers, only female illustrators, only female characters within the magazine.

We published this edition, and somebody wrote to us and said, I see that you’ve published this women’s only edition. Should I assume that there’ll be a men’s only edition in the future? And I was like, if we published only women’s stories for the next 500 editions, we would not even come close to rebalancing the lack of coverage that women’s sport gets in the media.

So, in our own tiny little way, I think that giving voice to, to be blunt, giving voice to not me is important. And it’s something that we’ve really focused on. It’s part of the editorial.

Samir Husni: My typical two last questions, if I come to visit you at your flat or your house one evening unannounced, what do I catch Simon doing? Reading a book, watching TV, having a glass of wine? How do you rewind the day?

Simon Freeman: I stopped drinking at the beginning of this year.

The best decision I ever made. I work too late. I’ll often at 9:30 or 10 o’clock, I’ll have to remind myself to switch off. I love reading books.

I’m currently reading Robert Caro’s autobiography of President Lyndon Johnson. That’s probably how I relax towards the end of the day. Political history is exciting.

I love reading about political history or I’ve always got a magazine. There’s always a magazine on the go, whatever different topics. That’s hopefully what you’d catch me doing. We don’t own a TV, so it wouldn’t be watching TV.

Samir Husni: What keeps Simon up at night these days?

Simon Freeman: We are pushing our business to the limits and that is causing a lot of financial stress. And it’s intentional, but it does mean that I will often wake up at two o’clock in the morning and pay for the next print bill or the next salary run or whatever else. It’s hard, making sure that the magazine or the business is financially secure.

It’s the thing that keeps me awake at night.

Samir Husni: Thank you and all the best.

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Different Leaf Magazine: The Intersection Of Culture & Cannabis. The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Michael Kusek, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief

June 22, 2026

Michael Kusek knows when to hold them and he knows when to fold them, like the country music song goes. He started an art magazine for New England called Take few years back, only to fold it and launch Different Leaf magazine, a cannabis magazine for Massachusetts and New England, which he also folded five years later in the midst of all the advertising struggles that the industry was facing as you will read in this interview.

Now he is relaunching Different Leaf with a completely different approach. One, it is no longer a regional magazine, but rather a global one, and two, it is a collector’s item to be hold and displayed, like an art piece. In addition, each issue will have a guest editor or two who will be very involved in the magazine creation. The guest editors for issue 1 is no other that Nick Cave and Bob Faust. Also, a first for the magazine is a magazine curator: Denise Markonish, who is the curator of the first issue. She was the curator at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art for the last 18 years.

*The first issue of the relaunched Different Leaf*

The curated magazine will come in three different formats, a soft cover costing $40, a hard cover costing $100 and a collector’s box with pieces of art costing a hefty $1,000.

As Michael says, there is an entry point to each reader or customer and based on what I saw, each entry point is worth it, so hopefully this third launch is a charm.

Without further ado, please enjoy my interview with a true believer in print and in its permeance. Michael Kusek, publisher and editor in chief of Different Leaf magazine.

But first the soundbites:

On whether the third time is a charm: “Sure. One hopes, one hopes that the old adage lives up to its lives up to its reputation.”

On the audience: “You had magazines that were definitely targeted towards much younger people. The content in general and the pop culture angles were much younger…There wasn’t anything out there for the older beginner cannabis user at the time that rapidly changed.”

On the new direction for Different Leaf: “The writers that we worked with really closely, were very interested in the cultural intersection of cannabis and the broader culture.”

On the content of the magazine: “How cannabis impacted the broader culture and how the broader culture was impacting cannabis.”

On the mission of Different Leaf: “…bringing in creatives from the world of fine art, music, and fashion to guest edit three issues about their particular look at the intersection of cannabis and culture.”

On the magazine’s format: “Nick and Bob decided that they didn’t want to structure it like a magazine. So, it’s not. It doesn’t have a front of book. It doesn’t have a well, it doesn’t have a back of book. It has a couple of things that make it look like a magazine inside, but it is an art piece in a lot of ways. And it’s ink on paper. It’s in print.”

On the power of print in a digital age: “But it feels like in a period of time where we don’t know what’s real, at least having something you can hold in your hand feels real.”

More on the power of print: “I’m more convinced in the importance of print now than I think I ever have been, because this will always remain this, like this isn’t going to go away. It’s going to stay on a shelf.”

And even more on the power of print: “People used to say to me, why are you doing print? And I was like, because 20 years from now, you’ll still be able to read the interview I’m doing with you. You’ll be able to pick it up and read it. You know, the interview you do online may or may not be there.”

On the major difference this time than the previous ones: “A difference, certainly, is the magazine is going to be global. For the first time, it’ll be available, around the world and on newsstands around the world, which is an exciting difference.”

On what keeps him up at night these days: “Will our guest editor for issue two say yes. I would love it if she did. It would be great to announce it at some point.”

And now for the lightly edited interview with Michael Kusek, publisher and editor in chief, Different Leaf magazine.

Samir Husni: So, tell me, is the third time a charm?

Michael Kusek: Sure. One hopes, one hopes that the old adage lives up to its lives up to its reputation.

SH: Why the relaunch now?

MK: A lot of reasons went into sort of the change.

I think on one hand is the cannabis industry and business in general is always wildly in flux. And so it makes operating in that business environment very tricky. One of the challenges in being a national cannabis magazine was the way advertising is regulated state by state, unlike other industries in this country, where, for instance, cigarettes, there are national regulations around cigarette advertising or alcohol advertising, Federal Trade Commission, sort of standards. So when Different Leaf was just a regional magazine covering Massachusetts and New England, selling advertising was much easier because the advertisers were trying to fulfill regulations for a smaller number of states.

The difference between regional and national

But once we went national, I had more than one perspective, one cannabis company that’s operating on a national level, operating in multiple states, say, well, we can’t take an ad out with you because we can’t design an ad that’s compliant for every state. And so, being small was actually more successful in a way, being just Massachusetts, just New England was much more successful than being national. It made a lot more challenges, just on the business end.

Then on the editorial end there was a real rapid change in five years, which was when I started researching what was out there in the world of magazines covering the cannabis space. You had magazines that were definitely targeted towards much younger people. The content in general and the pop culture angles were much younger.

The way the products were described was definitely much younger. And then you had sort of things like High Times, which were senior level, like a senior level seminar on cannabis, as opposed to something for beginners. There wasn’t anything out there for the older beginner cannabis user at the time that rapidly changed.

You had much more mainstream media pickup on cannabis as a topic. From the time we started to the time we stopped those five years, the number of times that cannabis appeared positively in The New York Times, it really increased a lot.

It was very interesting reading articles we’d already written in The New York Times, after the fact. So, we’re like, we did that two years ago. The sense of our uniqueness in the space was kind of under threat in a way, the mainstream media was going to come along and eat our lunch.

When I made these decisions two years ago, things have changed half a dozen to dozen times in terms of social media. Some days Meta is fine with cannabis advertising. Some days Meta is not fine with cannabis advertising. I think people in the cannabis space, and it’s a problem I face today as a cannabis adjacent arts magazine right now, talking about cannabis on social media can get you banned very quickly and very easily.

On the editorial front, mainstream media was kind of coming along. And then what we wanted to do as a team, the writers who worked for me, we were interested in this particular angle in the cannabis industry that was ultimately not as big as we thought it was going to be. You have a small, savvy group of people in the cannabis industry who are doing new things, and a whole lot of people who are copying them.

A new beginning: A cultural intersection of cannabis and the broader culture

When we got down to looking for topics to write about, or for businesses to write about, we kept coming back to the same pool of businesses repeatedly. One of my better writers, somebody who’s been with me since the days of Take magazine, he’s great, he was a great arts writer who became a great weed writer, basically said to me, I’ve run out of adjectives to describe gummies. It just wasn’t there.

We were working with a great writer, somebody who came from Bon Appetit, who was writing about cannabis and food. And even they were like, I kind of want to talk about the cultural piece. The writers that we worked with closely, were very interested in the cultural intersection of cannabis and the broader culture.

How cannabis impacted the broader culture and how the broader culture was impacting cannabis. That, editorially, was where we were interested in doing. How I’ve ended up wrapping it up in the current package that we have is a long tail as well. But it was from talking to people in the industry, talking to people we work with, talking to people we cover, of what kind of things were you looking for? And then just that desire to try to keep things new and to keep things different.

That’s how we landed on this. I’ve always loved the guest editor idea. I always loved what Visionaire magazine did. A guest editor, or guest editors and bringing people in to work on a magazine, sometimes it can be just a little throwaway. You can see that there wasn’t a lot of real input from the person who did it. And then in other instances, like A magazine, a magazine curated by the fashion title that hands itself over to a different fashion designer or fashion house, every issue, that’s just, it works so incredibly well. Every issue is a radical transformation.

So of course, you want to get every issue because it’s completely exciting every single time. And I prefer to go with that latter than the former. I think because cannabis changes so much as an industry and so much as a topic, one way to meet the challenge of covering that is to always bring fresh eyes into it over time.

I’m committed to this look at cannabis for at least three issues in this format, art, music, and fashion. We shall see if cannabis continues to be the main thrust of this, or if we move on to a different topic, because it’ll all depend on where cannabis is at that time.

SH: So if you are going to define the mission of those next three issues of Different Leaf, how would you define it?

MK: We are bringing in creatives from the world of fine art, music, and fashion to guest edit three issues about their particular look at the intersection of cannabis and culture.

That is our mission for these three issues. And we’re one down.

We are talking to our second guest editor next week to see if she’s willing to come on board. And so there is interest in this, and we’re selling them online already, and we haven’t even printed them. So that’s always exciting.

SH: You are offering the magazine in three different packages. You have the soft cover, you have a hardback cover, or have a collector’s box with art pieces.

MK: Yes, that was the other different way of looking at this and looking at the revenue stream. I don’t think we would have been able to do this model of selling the magazine without my friend, Denise Markonish, who is the curator of the first issue. She was the curator at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art for the last 18 years.

She’s just switched and she’s now working in New York City, but she’s been a longtime friend. She was somebody I talked to about this project, and she said I’ve never curated a magazine. I’d love to do that.

And so I was like, cool, you can be my first curator. She has the ability to call up Nick Cave and Bob Faust, and she literally sat here in my office, texted them, and they both said yes. I don’t think we’d be able to do that artist edition level, particularly out of the gate without names like Nick Cave and Bob Faust.

It really made a big difference. But also having them involved made a very big difference in who ultimately became involved with all of the editorial in the book. We were able to bring in the author Jonathan Lethem.

We were able to work with the Broadway star André De Shields. It allowed us to sort of level up some of the creative people who came on board. Ultimately, I think that also allows us to sell this artist edition.

The bells and whistles in the artist edition come with a little rolling tray designed by Nick and Bob, and a sleeping mask, which all fits in with the book. And that’s all a limited-edition little object.

So there is interest out there with very little marketing on that front. We’ve sold a couple. We’re about to print up the boxes that it comes in.

SH: The magazine is not cheap.

MK: $1,000 for the box. It is a very limited-edition art piece. $100 for the hardback, and $100 for the hardcover and then 40 for the newsstand. So there is an entry point for everyone.

I had a great intern, a student from UMass, son of a dear college friend, a couple summers ago, as I was thinking about this project, who came to work with me for the summer.

And we talked, we always were talking about things, things that he’s interested in. It’s always nice to talk to somebody half your age every once in a while, to find out, what’s cool, or confirm your priors or learn something new. He talked to me very excitedly about a book he bought. It was a Faden Press book of Virgil Abloh, the fashion designer who was at Louis Vuitton, designed for Nike, and was a very high in demand as a streetwear designer. Abloh had so many cultural connections.

My intern talked to me very excitedly about how he saved up his money to buy that book. He wanted to have that $100 book on his shelf, and how much that book meant to him, because he was incredibly connected to Abloh as a cultural figure.

That meant a lot, and he talked a lot about how having the book on the coffee table meant something for him. I thought about that: for some magazine people it is only meant for a moment. And for some magazine people, those magazines are on a shelf for all time.

Thus, providing that limited run of hardcovers for folks gives them something to step up to, or aspire to, to add to their collection. And Nick in particular, as an artist, is one of those people.

I was in New York City to go to Nick’s gallery opening, I went with two friends of mine. And by 9:30, there were 1,000 people in that galley. I mean, it was mobbed.

It was absolutely mobbed. And overwhelmingly, the later part of the evening, it was incredibly young. And my friend, I was just looking at all of those people in there who love Nick, and one of my best friends who was with me said, so what do you think? I was like, A, incredibly happy for Nick. This is a phenomenal art opening. B, very happy about my choices.

So, we’re sort of seeing it for the third time. You talk about the third time is a charm. I’m working with an agency, which I’ve never done before, for any launch. I’m working with this agency, Digital Council in New York. They have a PR side called Cultural Council. Primarily, they work in the arts and museum space. They don’t work in the media space. They don’t work in the cannabis space.

In the last three weeks they’re saying we need to build up your audience online so that we can market back to them and sell the magazines and sell them books and that sort of thing.

They’ve been running ads for the magazine to find out more information about it. We’ve added something like 1500 names to our email list in three weeks, which for us is an enormous number of people in a short period of time. I’m encouraged, but also, it’s a crazy business. I feel like we threw everything into this issue that we could possibly throw into this issue. Like, I put it all in.

People who’ve seen it really like it, they really are enjoying it. I’ve had people read the proof of it cold, come in cold and just read it and look at it. And I had people in the art world look at it. I had people in the cannabis world look at it and just sort of said, like, is this something you would buy? And they were like, this is, I’ve never seen anything like it.

This is weird. Nick and Bob decided that they didn’t want to structure it like a magazine. So, it’s not. It doesn’t have a front of book. It doesn’t have a well, it doesn’t have a back of book.

It has a couple of things that make it look like a magazine inside, but it is an art piece in a lot of ways. And it’s ink on paper. It’s in print.

SH: Tell me about your love of print and why do you think the power of print in this digital age is still something to talk about?

MK: You and I have talked about this a bunch of the years that we’ve known each other. And I’m more convinced in the importance of print now than I think I ever have been, because this will always remain this, like this isn’t going to go away. It’s going to stay on a shelf.

I think about six, seven years ago, probably when I started Different Leaf and we did five years of issues of that. At the same time, there was a lot of stuff happening in cannabis. There were other titles around. Some of them were digital. Some of them were print. Some of them were both. A lot of them are gone, like don’t even exist on the web anymore. And so you have this stuff disappears. People used to say to me, why are you doing print? And I was like, because 20 years from now, you’ll still be able to read the interview I’m doing with you.

You’ll be able to pick it up and read it. You know, the interview you do online may or may not be there. But then the other part of that now with the rise of AI what is real on digital? The question about, I think that there is the question about what am I looking at? And is it real? And has a human written it? Has a human created this image beyond a prompt? That I’m not saying people in print aren’t using AI.

But if you’re committed to print, you’re probably committed to having people make the stuff that goes in print. I can’t imagine that there are many people out there who are like, I’m going to 100% make a print magazine out of AI. We haven’t run into them yet. Maybe they’ll show up at some point. But it feels like in a period of time where we don’t know what’s real, at least having something you can hold in your hand feels real.

SH: Before I ask you my typical last questions. Is there any question I failed to ask you you’d like me to ask you?

MK: What makes Different Leaf different? A difference, certainly, is the magazine is going to be global. We’re working with Ron Ali in the UK. We, we also have some distribution here. Barnes and Noble has picked us up as well, which I think is interesting for we have a high cover price. These were not cheap to make. And these are not cheap to produce and are not cheap to print. I’m printing in Italy, which is different. I’m printing in Italy because that proved to be the best price. And working with a printer, Nova Press that can do the complexity of it all.

The other part of the business and what’s radically different is that this is a global thing. For the first time, it’ll be available, around the world and on newsstands around the world, which is an exciting difference.

It’ll be interesting to see how we can build a global audience rather than just a domestic one.

SH: My typical last two questions are, if I come to visit you one day unannounced, what do I catch Michael doing at home in the evening, smoking a joint, having a glass of wine, reading a book, watching TV?

MK: Of late, I’ve literally been watching TV. I’ve been assembling things to put in the artist box.

So, I’ve been doing arts and crafts. I am wending my way through the giant stack of magazines I have. I over shopped over the last couple months, but with little time to read.

I’m reading to see what other people are doing. That’s what I’m doing these days. And it’s very exciting. I’m supporting my peers by reading them.

SH: And what keeps you up at night these days?

MK: I think what’s keeping me up right now is the next five months are going to be a lot of promotional activity and will our guest editor for issue two say yes. I would love it if she did. It would be great to announce it at some point.

SH: Thank you and congratulations again on the relaunch.

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Art Lover’ Magazine: Nude Vs. Lewd. A Book-in-a-Blog, by Samir “Mr. Magazine™” Husni, Chapter 2, Part 2

June 18, 2026

A century ago, we were more culturally and artistically advanced. Magazines in the 1920s shined a very bright light on art and culture. One such magazine, albeit short lived, Art Lovers’ Magazine, is but one example of a cultural and artistic publication from 100 years ago when magazines ruled the media world. Here is its story:

Chapter 2, Part 2

The Hubbard Connection

A lot has been written about Elbert Hubbard the founder of the Roycroft handicraft community of the late 19^th century and early 20^th century. The same can be said about Freeman H. Hubbard who was appointed editor of Art Lovers’ magazine commencing with the second issue of the magazine. However, all the current references about Freeman Hubbard are in his association as an author and editor of Railroad magazine from 1930 until its demise in 1979.

Although Art Lovers’ magazine was published by Art Publications, Inc. in New York City, its covers touted that it is a Hubbard Publication starting with issue 4. The president of the company was Walter W. Hubbard and the associate editor of the magazine was the “Rev. Walter Warren Hubbard, the son of one the founders of Hubbard Publishing Company” that was founded in Philadelphia, PA in 1868 by Alfred H. Hubbard and Frank W. Judd as the Hubbard Brothers and was renamed the Hubbard Publishing Company in 1893 according to the 19^th Century Juvenile Series last revision on Feb. 24, 2025.

The original Hubbard Publishing Company was, “a subscription publishing house” and “a well-known Bible publisher,” according to the source.

One early indication of the relationship between Art Lovers’ magazine and Hubbard Publications is the reference to Art Lovers’ in a Feb. 1925 article about the photographer James Wallace Pondelicek in Hubbard’s The American Art Student and Commercial Artist magazine. “Without a doubt, James Wallace Pondelicek, photographer and artist, ranks among the few pictorial photographers of America whose work merits the highest honors. As a figure photographer he is a master,” the editors wrote.

They continued, “Of late Mr. Pondelicek, whose work has appeared in the columns of this, and of Art Lovers’ Magazine, has been going in for advertisement illustration. We hope to persuade him, at some time in the near future, to contribute an article, helpful and technical, based on his experiences along that line.”

With the second issue of the magazine, the Hubbard connection became more obvious. In addition to Walter W. Hubbard and Freeman H Hubbard, the magazine announced the appointment of “the Rev. Walter W. Hubbard, of the Philadelphia Law and Order Society and of the Pennsylvania Anti-Saloon League as associate editor with this issue.”

Between the credentials of Freeman H Hubbard and the Rev. Walter W. Hubbard, you will think Art Lovers’ is more of moral, religious magazine. Read how Freeman was introduced when they announced him as editor of the magazine, “The publishers of ART LOVERS’ MAGAZINE announce the appointment of Freeman H. Hubbard, A.B., as editor, effective with this issue.”

“Mr. Hubbard was a scholarship winner at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts…In addition, he is well known as a writer of short stories…Mr. Hubbard is recognized as an authority on ethics, having recently received the award of the Philadelphia Ethical Culture Society for the best statement of the meaning of the ethical movement.”

The editorial added, “His connection with ART LOVERS’ Magazine, therefore, is assurance that it will be kept to a high moral standard without losing any of its attractiveness.”

As for the Rev. Water W. Hubbard, the associate editor of the magazine is introduced in issue 3 as, “The son of one of the founders of the Hubbard Publishing Company—the Rev. Walter Warren Hubbard, of the Philadelphia Law and Order Society, widely known preacher and lecturer for the Pennsylvania Anti-Saloon League…”

In fact the Reverand Water Warren Hubbard had a story in issue 3 of the magazine titled, “Three Red Sweaters and a Canary Bird.” Another Hubbard also wrote for the magazine; Henry D. Hubbard, the assistant director of Bureau of Standards, Washington, D. C.: He wrote about “Ther Motion Pictures of Tomorrow.”

Yet, one more Hubbard is also included in the third issue of Art Lovers’ magazine. Hesketh Hubbard, “eminent British artist, has assembled a collection of two hundred and thirty-two prints by ninety-seven contemporary British artists, which arrived in this country recently for exhibition, during March, at the Brooklyn Museum, and later in other museums and galleries in this country.”

The publishers of Art Lovers’ magazine were also proud of their relationship with the late “Elbert Hubbard and his son, Elbert Hubbard II, and we lose no opportunity to speak well of the Roycroft publications of East Aurora, N.Y.”

To be continued…

Next: Ethical issues in the American land…

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To Serve Kids Better, You Need To Be BOLDER: The Mr. Magazine™ Interview with Bronwyn Weaver Archibald, Editor In Chief Of BOLDER Magazine.

June 15, 2026

It takes a bold person, bold in vision, bold in mission, and bold in goal to create a BOLDER magazine. That bold person is Bronwyn Weaver Archibald, editor in chief of BOLDER magazine, the new monthly magazine for “Kids 8-80″. I had an opportunity to chat with Bronwyn and we talked about BOLDER, the magazine, the role of print in this digital age, the birth of the idea to create a magazine about “Where Things Come From & Why We Care.”

With a degree in Geology and English and armed with a very positive view of our world and how it turns, Bronwyn decided to swim against the current and about two years ago, she “started hatching an idea, a pretty big idea. A BOLDacious idea. Why not start an earth science magazine for kids from 8 to 80? A magazine so cool that everyone will be more curious about where things come from and why we care so much.” And, if I may add, she is swimming very well, thank you very much.

So, without any further ado, please enjoy my interview with Bronwyn Weaver Archibald, editor in chief of BOLDER magazine:

But first the soundbites:

On the Bolder idea: “It was our big idea about two years ago to create a magazine that would engage not only the kids but the whole family about where things come from and why we should care about it. So, BOLDER was born.”

On why print in this digital age: “Print is so important for, especially for engaging anybody under the age of 18. I think that the way that studies have shown that the way that a young brain works, it is a much healthier environment for them to read information and to be able to enjoy it, to be able to engage with the information when it’s in print.”

On a magazine for 8-80: “We’ve found since we introduced our magazine is that we’re writing about things that are enjoyable to discover and to learn about from truly the whole spectrum in a family.”

On the idea behind the magazine: “Well, my background is in geology. And on our team of people, we’ve got subject matter experts that understand the discoveries in earth science, whether it’s discovering a resource and then figuring out how that powers the power station or goes into road building or how those resources are used.”

On using BOLDER in schools: “Some public schools are using the magazine to encourage reading to learn. We’ve got some schools that are using us for enrichment programs. And we’ve got some schools that are just incorporating it into any of the earth science classes that they have.”

On her biggest obstacle: “We underestimated the impact of the digital creep on printed materials. We didn’t appreciate that it had been a long time since people got excited about a magazine that would come to their home that they could enjoy every month.”

On being timely yet timeless: “In fact, our first issue had a date on it. And after that, we decided that we would just put Roman numerals on them. And in our disposable world, we were encouraging anybody that would subscribe to the magazine to keep it. To maybe go ahead and try to get all of the volumes so they wouldn’t miss out on any of the fun information.”

On the magazine’s audience: “I’m able to reach who knows who, inspiring them in the same way that maybe something that they’ll learn in the magazine might lead to a curiosity, to spark an interest that’ll become a lifelong hobby, a lifelong interest, maybe their career.”

On the decision to be ad-free: “We as a team thought that it would be better not to have advertising so that it’s part of our mission with the magazine to just be telling stories and engaging on this wonderful content. We wanted to have a safe space where somebody isn’t being sold something.”

On what keeps her up at night: “Getting to kids that are fixed to their devices and interrupting that by getting them outside or giving them something in print to read. “

And now for the lightly edited interview with Bronwyn Weaver Archibald, editor in chief, BOLDER magazine:

Samir Husni: Please tell me about BOLDER.

Bronwyn Weaver Archibald: So, It was our big idea about two years ago to create a magazine that would engage not only the kids but the whole family about where things come from and why we should care about it. So, BOLDER was born.

SH: Why a print magazine in this digital age?

BWA: Print is so important for, especially for engaging anybody under the age of 18. I think that the way that studies have shown that the way that a young brain works, it is a much healthier environment for them to read information and to be able to enjoy it, to be able to engage with the information when it’s in print.

Being on devices is something parents, grandparents, schools, I think everybody is thinking second thoughts about having children only consume information that they see on devices. And so, we think the experience of holding something in your hands, of being able to read it kind of back and forth, to be able to pick out a pencil or a pen. We’ve got art exercises in the magazine to be able to engage with it, put it down, be able to pick it up and go back to it later. Those are, we think it’s not just old school or nostalgic, but it is something that is joyful that we want kids to experience.

SH: Your tagline, “A monthly Magazine For Kids 8-80”: care to explain?

BWA: Yeah, exactly. And that’s what we’ve found since we introduced our magazine is that we’re writing about things that are enjoyable to discover and to learn about from truly the whole spectrum in a family.

For the kids to share it with parents or grandparents, for parents to engage the kids with and not have it be boring, so many, from my perspective, a lot of the things that are written for children are so not engaging. I don’t know how to describe it better than that. They are maybe simplistic.

They all look the same sort of caricature. They don’t allow a child to use their imagination through the discovery. If you’ve ever seen the original Toy Story movie, it had sort of the subject matter and the content that was written to engage the children, but there was also a subtext that engaged the parents or an adult watching the movie so that we all enjoyed it together.

And that’s what we try to do in the magazine is to make it so that no matter what age you are, you can learn something and you can discover something that maybe you never appreciated before.

SH: What gave you the idea for BOLDER?

BWA: Well, my background is in geology. And on our team of people, we’ve got subject matter experts that understand the discoveries in earth science, whether it’s discovering a resource and then figuring out how that powers the power station or goes into road building or how those resources are used.

We’ve got people on our team that understand that. And we also have people on our team that our managing editor was a teacher for 15 years. So we delight in making it interesting for kids.

And we’re very passionate about our mission to connect the dots about where things come from. So we didn’t begin this exercise, begin BOLDER Magazine to be a profitable enterprise.

I guess it’s hard to admit. We started this magazine because we thought it was an important thing to do. And we’re hoping that it becomes more sustainable as more people find out about us.

We’re pretty passionate about our mission.

SH: I see you are, so to speak, spreading your wings to reach the schools now.

BWA: Yes. We’ve been very well received in the schools, whether it is a private or public schools. For example, we’re in quite a few Catholic elementary schools and we are in public schools.

Some public schools are using the magazine to encourage reading to learn. We’ve got some schools that are using us for enrichment programs. And we’ve got some schools that are just incorporating it into any of the earth science classes that they have.

Our magazine is designed to be supplemental. So we’re not trying to replace any curriculum. We don’t really have an agenda other than the fact that we want kids to be curious about getting outside and exploring nature and exploring earth science.

SH: You’ve done a wonderful job with the issues that I’ve seen. So tell me, has it been a walk in the Rose Garden?

BWA: It’s not been a walk in the Rose Garden. It has been, in some ways, it’s been a walk in the briar patch.

We underestimated the impact of the digital creep on printed materials. We didn’t appreciate that it had been a long time since people got excited about a magazine that would come to their home that they could enjoy every month. So, not only are we having to show people what we’ve got in the magazine, but we’re having to reintroduce them to what it is like to get something delivered in the mail that the whole family can enjoy reading.

I grew up with the old National Geographic magazines that whether you looked at the pictures or you were interested enough to read the articles, it was something that the whole family enjoyed. And then it got put on a shelf so that you could go back to it when you were curious again about it. And our magazine has a project in it every month for the whole family.

It has themes that are different from month to month. So one of the goals that we had was that we were going to create a magazine that had the longevity that it could be passed around in the family, could go from child to child and not fall apart. That’s why we’ve taken the, we made the investment to have the magazine printed from a really wonderful printer.

It’s almost like getting a book every month. And with the theme, each issue has a different theme.

SH: So it’s indeed timely but timeless.

BWA: Exactly. In fact, our first issue had a date on it. And after that, we decided that we would just put Roman numerals on them.

And in our disposable world, we were encouraging anybody that would subscribe to the magazine to keep it. To maybe go ahead and try to get all of the volumes so they wouldn’t miss out on any of the fun information.

SH: So you underestimated the digital creep? What other obstacles or challenges you faced and you were able to overcome in the last year or so?

BWA: Well, one big part of our mission is to combat what we see as a pretty horrible condition in that children and adults alike face climate anxiety. And there is so much chatter about running out of resources and the state of our climate and it is creating a lot of fear. And so, part of our mission is to talk about how we’re not running out of resources.

That we’re solving problems every day and industry is doing a pretty good job in being problem solvers. And perhaps some of our young readers will be curious enough that it might lead them on a career path because there’s so many opportunities. We don’t talk about anything controversial in our pages, but we’re trying to communicate that there is an abundance that we should be grateful for.

And that kids all need to be outside as much as possible and not to be fearful of being outside. So our message is really starting to resonate. We feel that every month we get more people that find out about our magazine and agree with our mission to get kids interested in reading.

They’re discovering things like we have in every issue, we have two audio stories so that you can listen to the story as you read along. So our magazine is actually like an audio book and we’re not anti-technology, we just think there’s value in getting something in print. So every month that we print another magazine and we’re out there doing our job, more people find out about us.

So we’re having to hold on a little bit longer than we thought. We thought people would be signing up like crazy. We realize now we have to do a better job convincing them why it’s worth giving us a shot to try out a subscription.

SH: You’re a positive voice in the midst of a sea of negative voice and information.

BWA: Thank you for saying that.

SH: Like any positive voice, it’s hard in this, what I call the jungle of negativity that we live in. It’s so hard to break through. So I congratulate you on the magazine and wish you all the best.

So tell me, which one do you like more, being a geologist or being an editor-in-chief?

BWA: You know, I just had an experience just in the past week. I reached out to my mentor that I had when I was beginning to study geology in college. I had a professor.

His name is Dr. James Aronson. He’s almost 90 years old. He got me so excited about learning geology and discovering earth science.

He was such an inspiration. I told him the reason why I reached out to him was that through the magazine, I’m able to reach who knows who, inspiring them in the same way that maybe something that they’ll learn in the magazine might lead to a curiosity, to spark an interest that’ll become a lifelong hobby, a lifelong interest, maybe their career. And so just as I was inspired, I love the thought that our magazine can inspire the next generation.

SH: So tell me, what type of question that so far I failed to ask you that I should ask you?

BWA: I’m glad you did because I was wondering when you were going to ask me, why do we not have any advertising? And I wonder that often because we do need subscribers. I would love to be able to get another four or 5,000 subscribers would make a huge difference to the economics of what we’re trying to do. But we as a team thought that it would be better not to have advertising so that it’s part of our mission with the magazine to just be telling stories and engaging on this wonderful content.

We wanted to have a safe space where somebody isn’t being sold something. But I don’t know whether we are a real outlier.

SH: Before I ask you my typical last questions, anything you would like to add or anything you would like to about BOLDER?

WBA: We formulated our magazine based on our mission of what we wanted to accomplish. We wanted it to be perfect bound, but we didn’t want it to be ridiculous, so we made it 80 pages. We could have probably made it eight or 16 pages shorter, but then the spine is silly.

We feel that the content is enough so that something in our magazine will engage somebody in the family. And again, if we were making it thinner or less frequent, we think that would be a disservice. Because we are a startup and we haven’t gotten to the point where we’re sustainable yet.

SH: My typical last questions, if I come uninvited one evening to your house, what do I catch you doing, reading a book, watching TV, cooking, having a glass of wine?

BWA: Well, at our house, I would say that it would be more like, we would describe it as you would come unannounced to our farm. And this is the farm.

I’m sitting in a barn. That’s where my office is that was built in 1870. It is the farm that I grew up on.

And my husband, who is a third-generation mining engineer, and our daughters work in this business, too. So, we this is part of our passion is that you might see any or all of us here and we might be feeding baby dairy goats. We would be working in our garden.

We’d be feeding chickens or feeding our horses. So we live mostly outside. We love being outside in the middle of things.

I guess that’s part of the reason why we feel called to get kids excited about being outside and exploring nature, too.

SH: So you are as BOLDacious as the magazine itself?

BWA: Yes. In fact, it was when we came up with the name of the magazine, we thought maybe at first it would be B-O-U-L-D-E-R.

And then we decided, no, we do love rocks and geology and earth science, but we want kids to be confident that we have got plenty of earth resources. We just need to all be stewards of them.

SH: My last typical question is, what keeps you up at night these days?

BWA: Getting to kids that are fixed to their devices and interrupting that by getting them outside or giving them something in print to read.

SH: Thank you.

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Lewd Vs. Nude: A Bible Publisher Launches Art Lovers’ Magazine A Century Ago. From the Vault, A Book-in-a-Blog By Mr. Magazine™ Chapter 2, Part 1.

June 8, 2026

Chapter 2, Part 1

A Bible Publisher Turns to Art

The beginning: A magazine for everyone

*The first issue of Art Lovers’ Magazine Jan. 1925*

There was no indication in the first issue of Art Lovers’ magazine that the magazine was a Hubbard Publication. The editorial page carried no masthead, and no table of contents. It served as a page, “In which we become acquainted with you, the reading public.”

The magazine was introduced as such: “ART LOVERS’ MAGAZINE will be published monthly, each month of the year, from their offices at 15 Park Row, New York, N.Y. It is owned and published by Art Publications, Inc., and is not connected, in any way, with any other publication at present.”

The only Hubbard name appearing in this issue was that of Freeman H Hubbard who wrote the short story “Yvonne” on pages 4 and 5. Later, in issue 2 of Art Lovers’, a masthead appears announcing that the magazine is published monthly by Art Publications, Inc., 15 Park Row, New York City, (other Hubbard Publications were published at 21 Park Row) with Walter W. Hubbard name as president and an announcement of appointing Freeman H Hubbard as editor of the magazine. It was not until issue 4 that the cover of the magazine carried the line, “A Hubbard Publication,” while the masthead continued to say it is an Art Publications, Inc. magazine.

*The second issue of Art Lovers’ magazine Feb. 1925*

The cover of the first issue of the magazine featured two women, one half naked, in a room setting chatting with each other. Nudity was present in abundance in the inside pages of the magazine that touted “Beauty, Fiction, Art and Life.” With issues 2 and 3, the word Truth was added to the tag line reading, “A Magazine of Truth, Beauty, Fiction, Art, and Life.” However, the word Truth did not last but for those two issues. With issue 4, the word Truth disappeared from the tag line.

Unlike other art magazines of that period, Art Lovers’, in the words of its editors, “will, to the best of our ability, be ‘an all-around meal’ for every one in the family, especially to lovers of beauty, art, fiction, and the theatres. It will contain, each month, excellent stories; — mystery, love, adventure, and true-to -life tales; fully illustrated.”

The editors continue, “We have purposely avoided making this a ‘one-track’ magazine. It is something you can spend hours with; buy it before you go on a railroad journey this winter, for example, and see just how quickly time flies.”

No advertising in the first issue

Another point of differentiation from the rest of the magazines of that era, is that the editors decided not to accept any ads in the first issue. They wrote, “Before the magazine went to press at our rotogravure plant we were obliged to turn down slightly over two pages of advertising. The editorial board decided that there must positively be no advertising in the initial number, and the business office has reluctantly yielded.”

However, the magazine’s editorial board was not completely against accepting ads in the magazine, for they were quick to add, “Future advertising will be scrupulously analyzed before it is accepted for these pages and every effort will be made to keep the highest standards possible. This means protection for us as well as for the readers.”

Another promise: Picture and fiction magazine

The editors added one more promise to the readers of the magazine, “Within the next few months the number of pages will be materially increased, and color covers will be added later. Every improvement possible will be carefully considered and acted upon, — in and endeavor to fill the need of a combined picture and fiction magazine. And in the meantime, –‘On with the dance,– let joy be unconfined.”

Next: The Hubbard Connection

And in case you missed the four parts of chapter one here are the links

Posted in A Launch Story..., From the Vault, Magazine Power, Nude Vs. Lewd | Leave a Comment »

Rap Central Station: The Essence Of A New Magazine 2026 (As In INK ON PAPER Magazine): A Mr. Magazine™ Musing

May 31, 2026

Slow the culture so we can breathe again…

At least 30 new magazines were launched in the first five months of 2026. Those who know me, know that my definition of a magazine is, “If it is not ink on paper, it is NOT a magazine.” Feel free to call those digital platforms anything you want, except a magazine. We never called television radio with pictures.

This leads me to a great editorial written by the editor of the new magazine Rap Central Station. An oversized publication measuring 12X12 inches and refers to itself as a MAGPAPER. The editor writes in the second issue of the magazine, and I quote, “Scrolling ain’t reading. Texting ain’t writing. That line hit even harder after the response to the debut issue of Rap Central Station earlier this year. What we didn’t expect – but we fully respect – is how fast the magazine is becoming a collector’s item. That tells us something important: people still need tangible culture. Something you can hold. Something that doesn’t disappear with a swipe.”

The editor continues, “I’m not gonna front I h’ve been inspired with stories of 2 fledgling magazine publishers from 75 years ago. John Johnson with JET EBONY and Hugh Hefner from Playboy. Both ironically from Chicago. They had visions against insurmountable odds.”

So, what is this magazine that was inspired by two of our great magazine publishers of the last century. The editor writes, “We are an art magazine first. Then artist – driven storytelling. Then music—charted with intention. We believe artists should write their own reviews. Nobody listens harder than the creator. That’s the innovation. That’s how you reverse some of the damage done to hip-hop by speed, neglect, and surface-level coverage. This magazine slows the culture down—so it can breathe again.”

And all what Mr. Magazine™ can say to that is Amen! Let’s slow the culture down a bit, so we can all breathe again.

Posted in A Launch Story..., A Mr. Magazine™ Musing, Innovation in print, Magazine Power, New Launches, News and Views | Leave a Comment »

In-Depth Conversation With Roger Black: From AMERIKA To Big Bend Sentinel… The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With A Genius Art Director

December 18, 2025

“This is a hard time to start a magazine. The country shaking like an old drunk. Who knows he has to give up the hoosh. Does not provide a climate of reason and ease that magazines thrive on. There is a recession.Magazines are collapsing left and right,” wrote Roger Black in his role as Editor of a magazine called AMERIKA in 1970.

Mr. Black was a student at the University of Chicago and editor of the students’ newspaper, The Maroon. AMERIKA was forced to change its name after the dummy issue was published and the first and only issue published was called PRINT PROJECT AMERIKA.

I reached out to Mr. Black to talk about the story of AMERIKA and to get an update on what he is up to these days. He told me that he’s “back actually doing a publication. And this is an urgent time for magazines and newspapers. We must find a way of keeping them going, keeping them independent.”

In fact, Roger Black wrote this week on his Facebook page under the heading “ROGER BLACK’S FAREWELL TOUR?” Join me at Big Bend Sentinel, where a team of innovative journalists is redefining local news. We’re testing two old ideas. In the video (that accompanied the post) watch for the key words: “fact” and “art.”

Mr. Black continued, “I started this tour in 1973 as art director of LA (1973). Now, as acting Art Director and non-profit chair, I’m back to weekly newspapers! The real work is done by a small energetic band of editors led by Rob D’Amico, Sam Karas, Mary Etherington, and Ariele Gentiles.”

He adds, “Can weekly newspapers survive and flourish? Can we hold onto local journalism?”

I reached out to Mr. Black to ask him about his original work on newspapers and magazines. I was mainly interested in the very first magazine, “AMERIKA” he edited while still a student at the university. Needless to say, he is a wealth of information and he has left his thumb print on many national and regional publication throughout his career. I hope you will enjoy this lightly edited conversation with a person who for years I called “a genius creative art director.”

Samir Husni: You ask Chat GPT about Roger Black and it tells you, “Very influential in magazine and newspaper design,” but no mention that you were an editor of a magazine back in 1970 while you were still a student at the University of Chicago.

Roger Black: Yes.

Samir Husni: And the magazine was called America with a K: AMERIKA

Roger Black: Well, that was the dummy. Later, it was PRINT PROJECT AMERIKA. There were only the dummy issue and the one and only first issue.

Samir Husni: So, tell me about your journey with AMERIKA.

Roger Black: AMERIKA was envisioned as Parade magazine (The Sunday newspaper supplement) for student newspapers.

In 1968, I was the editor of the Maroon, the student paper of the college at the University of Chicago. I must tell you, that was a very good year to be a student editor. And particularly in Chicago.

We had a lot of news. It was a big time for change. We started putting out a weekly magazine called Gray City Journal, which ultimately became its own publication.

So we started thinking that many student papers don’t have that kind of content. Harvard, Yale, and other elite schools do.

But in terms of magazine style, both entertainment and serious stuff, photojournalism and drawings, they didn’t really exist. If you go back and look at the 1960s’ student newspapers they were pretty dry.

A guy in the business school at the university, named Mark Brawerman, who is from California, came up with the idea.

A very sharp guy who just started school. He didn’t really have any business experience.

He thought that we could do this. One of the things that he did, and with my involvement, I thought it was a good idea, too, he started writing all the student newspaper editors and publishers saying, we have this idea.

Would you be interested in taking it? And we’re going to print a prototype, and you can decide. That was the reason for the prototype; we had to get the circulation.

I was interested in design. I had started doing some publication work before I got to college. I had a wonderful teacher named Robert Gothard, a famous typographer, who did student, alumni magazines, and other publications for universities and colleges and did other things, too. He was a great designer.

So, I got interested. He was the first art director of Print magazine, for example. I was really interested in magazines from really as a young kid. My mother worked for magazines.

We had written all these people, and we got enough responses that if we could print 200,000, we could have distributed them.

So I started working on the prototype. And it’s funny because my girlfriend at the time is listed as the art director. I don’t even remember her name now.

There you go. The prototype cover came from Kent State. It was from an art student there who did this kind of Andy Warhol homage after the Kent State shooting. And there’s more stuff of that inside. Anyway, I thought I could be a designer.

I looked at a lot of magazines. How hard can it be? So, I did this issue, this prototype. And by some wild set of coincidences, Sam Antupit, who is a great art director, the art director of Esquire at that time.

George Lewis did the covers, but he did the inside. And it was beautiful. He was doing a special issue of Print Magazine about magazines.

And he put this in a box called Hopeful Upstarts. We realized we were going to leave Chicago and move operation to New York. So, I got to New York and I looked him up.

And we had gotten some funding. We were starting to sell ads. But I couldn’t find an art director.

That was the funny thing. There weren’t a lot of people, if you think about it, Rolling Stone and New York Magazine only started in 1967. And before that, there were art directors at Esquire or at Town and Country or the fashion magazines, and Holiday magazine.

There were certain kind of visual magazines that had art directors. But National Geographic didn’t have an art director. Life Magazine didn’t have an art director.

It was not really one of those job descriptions that people, their mom said, you can be an art director. No one, no one really was thinking about that. And I couldn’t find any.

But Sam had this fantastic studio on, I’m going to say, East 52nd Street in a brownstone building. Later, the previous Citicorp Village was built there. But he was doing a bunch of different magazines out of the studio or doing designs, and redesigns.

He had a famous magazine artist, Richard Hess, who was his partner in that. So, it was called Hess and Antupit.

It was the name of the studio. And they were on the top floor. I was totally blown away how great it all was.

He did have student aides from SVA or Pratt or Cooper Union students working part time or as interns for him. What he couldn’t really recommend any other kids to be art directors. I finally came back and asked him if he would do it.

And by some miracle he said yes. And agreed to our price, which included all the type setting, all the illustrations and photos, the whole art project. He said he would do it for a fixed price.

I probably lost my shirt on it. He took over in that first real estate number one. It was really the designer’s Hess and Antupit.

I got to be the editor. So that was fun.

Samir Husni: The dummy issue was called AMERIKA, and the first issue PRINT PROJECT AMERIKA, why did you change the name?

Roger Black: I’ll tell you the story why we changed the name.

We got a letter from the Catholic Church. They sent us an official letter saying that they have a magazine called America and we have the trademark, so you can’t use America even with changing the C to a K.

Of course, I knew even at age 20 that you can’t trademark a place name. You can’t put a trademark on America. So I wrote back saying, you can’t trademark a place name.

So, I’m ignoring their letter. They wrote back and said, well, how many lawyers do you have? Basically, I said, these people are going to give us a hard time. I’m going to just add a qualifier.

We added the phrase PRINT PROJECT AMERIKA. We made it more experimental, new media feeling.

Samir Husni: The State Department didn’t send you a letter saying we have a magazine aimed to the Soviet Union called America.

Roger Black: Well, their magazine was only circulating in Russia. And we weren’t going to Russia. They are not allowed to distribute it here.

Samir Husni: In this digital age, where do you see print role?

Roger Black: Print magazines had a very good run. I like to say it was a hundred-year run. If you look at the magazines, like the late 19th century, magazines that started running art, photo engraving had come in.

They were impressive. And then you had with the invention, of rotary presses and linotype typesetting and all that. Magazines followed the newspapers in increasing press runs.

So you had the concept of mass magazines. That whole business model kept morphing. Everyone forgets about this, you know, like in 1995, the commercial web appeared and everybody said, oh, everything’s over.

But I don’t think the commercial web was much more of a kick in the head than the television. And before that, there was a similar abrupt change with radio. The idea that entertainment could just sit in your chair and not have to think and just listen.

Magazines like The Saturday Evening Post were really hurt by that. Because that was their position, at home after they were reading entertaining stuff. But they survived and they adapted.

I think that the biggest challenge for a contemporary magazine, and that also includes online, is the attention span problem and the way that the kind of addiction to the constant scroll, just going vertically with dozens of different things that you’re barely aware of what it is. You stop on a cat or whatever you want to look at.

That has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. We didn’t even know about TikTok 10 years ago. And Facebook seems for people my age now.

All that keeps morphing. Instagram had its moment in the sun. And everything, everything is always moving. My feeling is that print offers a new kind of respite for that.

In the way that radio seemed like a respite for reading. Print, going back to reading, is a relief from that addictive scrolling that everyone’s doing. Or just that very short attention span, you look at one thing, you look at another thing, you look at another thing.

That kind of short attention span gets tiresome after a while. And why can’t I say that with any confidence? It’s because the long form media, like books or movies, are blasting ahead fun. I mean, movie says, the movie, the Hollywood studio business is once again in convulsions. With every year, there’s a headline that says, Hollywood is no longer the same. It will never be the same.

We don’t recognize it anymore. And they’ve been saying that since about 1920 since talkies came in. So that long form sitting in a movie theater or watching it on Netflix is a very compelling experience.

And people enjoy it. It’s still, there is a business model in the same way that music kind of changes business model from the time of the record business. Movies are too, but also books.

It’s very interesting to me to see things like the eBooks for the digital side, but also bookstores are coming back. There are new bookstores everywhere. And there are very niche bookstores.

Bookstores about cooking or bookstores about architecture. All over the place. It’s fairly like Marfa, Texas, where I am right now, it’s just a few thousand people, right? It has an extremely good bookstore that also has a quite a good art collection.

Now, Marfa may be a special town, they just finished a new library or a big addition to this little library in Marathon, Texas. Population 400. And every time I’ve been by it, it’s full.

A lot of kids. Why is that? Because there’s something very pleasant about holding a book and reading it. And getting it, one of the advantages that books have and movies have over the endless internet is that you finish the book.

I’ve read the magazine. I’m done. I finished The New Yorker.

Almost nobody can say that online. There is a real feeling of accomplishment. And of course, The New Yorker’s secret that Howard Gossage, the advertising man, pointed out when he was doing their advertising.

The cartoons in The New Yorker are the guilt reliever. Because you can go, page all the way through, get a few chuckles. You might read a talk piece or one or two other things.

And then you sit the magazine down and somebody says, and you mentioned something that you saw in The New Yorker. I read it in The New Yorker. I read The New Yorker every week.

That’s a definite feeling of accomplishment. From a psychological point of view, there is satisfaction that comes from the phenomenon of the edition. This is a magazine.

This is the September issue of our magazine. Or this week’s magazine. Whatever.

And the same thing. You get to feel like you finished it. You go through it.

The online newspapers, you never finish. The digital crowd is very surprised that people like the PDF replicas of newspapers. Like The Dallas Morning News now presents that first.

If you go to their website, you get the replica first. Then you get the actual website. Because people know how that navigates.

They know where their stuff is. Everything’s in a familiar place. And things like PressReader made it increasingly easy to read on different devices.

The feeling about sessions, session time, completing an edition, very important. I think that magazines, in the same way that I think anthology, television like 60 Minutes will go on despite everything else. Now we still must work on the business model.

The numbers are much smaller than they used to be. We’re not doing mass magazine. But I think that quite a few people, we see people getting in and surviving.

And it’s delightful.

Samir Husni: Mr. Black, if someone comes to you and says, I want to start a new magazine, what do you tell them?

Roger Black: I really ask them, who’s your reader? I think it all starts with the reader.

Who is it you’re trying to talk to? Have you talked to them? You communicate with them. And I think that’s the way that we all got in the media have gotten in trouble over the years, is that we think that we’re the media. And it’s a two-way thing.

Reading is interactive. And I continue to find, maybe it’s because of my extreme age, I find reading the most effective kind of communication. It’s faster, it’s cheaper, and it’s inexpensive, as opposed to a video that you do on TikTok or YouTube.

That’s an effort. It’s a production. Maybe we don’t have a TV station like we used to.

And we’re relying a lot on Apple and the others to fix our video for us. But I think that having a group of people just writing, taking pictures and putting them together into a magazine, is very low cost compared to what the big guys are trying to do. And I think you can, if you make it good.

If you connect with the reader, it can work. And it doesn’t have to be high art. It doesn’t have to be the kind of level of journalism you’d expect in The New York Times or something else.

But if it can be good and readable, and is hitting a chord that people like, I think you can make it. One example you mentioned, Arena, the Santa Fe magazine, which is two old, French, encrusted print guys. One, John Miller, worked with me.

Owen Lipstein, somewhat controversial publisher from New York, who was the publisher of Smart Magazine, which I did in the late 90s with Terry McDonnell, only 13 issues ever published. Anyway, they got the idea of doing a big fat real estate magazine in Santa Fe, which of course, people in Marfa would say that Santa Fe is a real concoction of the real estate salespeople, which it may or may not be. But what they did to get the content, because they didn’t have a huge budget, and none of this stuff, no one is paying what Vanity Fair is paying.

I don’t think even Vanity Fair’s paying what they used to pay. But what John Miller, the editor there, and designer, did was to just do a lot of interviews. He had video, and some of the interviews were trimmed to just be the answers.

It was like a first-person article. Sometimes they would have a lot of pictures of their home, or they would go there. Sometimes it was just pick up what they could provide, the decorator, the designers, pictures of the house or whatever, or their potters, and they had stuff on their website.

Just thinking about it carefully and making it interesting with interesting people.

Basically, it’s all about the people in magazines. So you start with the reader, but then you give them stories about people to read.

That’s basically the core of every good magazine.

Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical two last questions, is there any question I failed to ask you you’d like me to ask?

Roger Black: I sort of expected you to say, why are you still doing this? Which is funny, I don’t know what else I would do. It’s like somebody says, why do you have this place in Texas out in the desert? And my answer is, I can’t think of anything, any other place I’d rather be.

I can’t think of anything else I would rather do than try to work with typography. We have Type Network, I’m chairman of Type Network, and we’re doing a wonderful collaboration with 100, more than 100 type designers and type founders with special custom design projects. Some of it is consulting, and some of it is type design.

I’m not a type designer, but I can connect them to the market. It’s a very small operation, but quite fun. I want to keep working.

My father worked till he was 80. And then, even later, he said, I never should have quit. So, the next question is, what are you doing now? As well as Type Network, I’ve come out to Marfa, and I’ve taken over by starting a new non-profit with Don Gardner from Austin, and Gonzalo Garcia Bautista from Mexico City.

We have started a non-profit, and we are now publishing this paper, which you can go to at BigBenSentinel.com. You can join and get the PDF, or we’ll mail it to you. For 60 bucks, we’ll mail it to you.

Folks, that price is going up, so act now.

Samir Husni: If I come unannounced to your house…

Roger Black: In Marfa, now? Well, it’s a marathon. I also hang out in Florida. We’re still repairing from the hurricane last year.

And I have an apartment with my husband in Oslo, Norway. So, I kind of am nicely balanced.

Samir Husni: So, if I come unannounced one evening, what do I catch Roger Black doing to rewind from a busy day?

Roger Black: Reading. I’m still old-fashioned.

Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night?

Roger Black: I don’t stay up at night. I am a great sleeper.

I don’t know why. I go to bed early. I go to bed by 11 or so.

In the old days, I’d stay up late. My peace of mind results from, as you get older, you realize you must let things go and become balanced, or you’re always anxious. The other thing that helps me, has helped me in my whole life, is I have a colossally developed ego.

It doesn’t occur to me until years later that I could be wrong. It’s like later people point out, that was a complete disaster. And I say you’re right.

I was completely unaware of that at the time. And I still, you know, it’s like I tried to do that thing, Screensaver, I thought we could do a technology solution for reading digitally. And it turned out that it didn’t work beautifully.

It turned out that the publishers didn’t have a business model for that. So, I do find myself waking up sometimes and thinking about those things. But I go right back to sleep.

I’m not what you’d call a troubled old man.

Samir Husni: Thank you. Take care. Have a great day.

Posted in A Launch Story..., From the Vault, Innovation in print, Inside the Great Minds of Magazine Makers, Magazine Power, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »

The Fabulist: A New Speculative Literature Magazine With A Print First Business Model. The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Josh Wilson, Editor & Publisher

December 1, 2025

Born from the womb of the web, The Fabulist launches its first print issue in 2026 after being a web only platform since 2007. To quote Josh Wilson, the magazine’s editor and publisher, in his letter to the readers accompanying issue zero of the magazine, “In a world that’s glutted with disposable digital ephemera, we love working with print: It is a tactile, tangible, dynamic, and long-lasting medium that transforms your experience as a reader, and celebrates the meaning and value of the works we publish.”

*Issue zero of The Fabulist, art by Glenn B*uack

And Mr. Magazine™ can’t but 100% agree with Mr. Wilson. There is no better place to combine “amazing stories, rich illustrations, and wild art,” than print. The Fabulist publishers believe so much in print that they make their business model print first.

Intrigued by the concept and the business plan, I reached out to Mr. Wilson to ask him more about the inception of The Fabulist, the plans and the reason for the print magazine after being a web only platform. We had a lovely conversation and learned the secrets behind the transformation from digital to print.

So, without any further ado, please join me in this lovely conversation with Josh Wilson, editor and publisher of The Fabulist.

But first, the soundbites:

Josh Wilson, editor and publisher, The Fabulist

On the reason for print: “I realized that print really was something people were attracted to and aspired to be a part of.”

On the background history of The Fabulist: “For several years we printed chapbooks, short 20, 30, 40, 50 pages, saddle stitched, single story publications. Then we began to think through our model and what we could do with it, which brought us around to this print magazine. I’m surprised to see that it’s really gaining traction.”

On his background: “I started out in print in the 1993 – 1995 period. I’m a journalist who worked at SF Gate in San Francisco and never went back to print until now. And it’s been a pleasure. I’m also amazed to find that readers and writers and everybody else is thrilled to see print happening.”

On The Fabulist elevator pitch: “We’re a literary, a speculative literature magazine. We publish fantasy and science fiction.”

On the business model: “I find that digital monetization is very, very hard, and it’s amazing to me that print from the previous millennium, the previous century, turns out to be a viable business model.”

On the zero issue: “It is a viable standalone issue. But we wanted to just see what we could do with print.”

On the art of curation in print: “There are space considerations in print, which makes the curation process more interesting. What order do the stories go in? What’s the effect of reading them in order? Each piece of art and its positioning, the layout.”

More on the art of curation in print: “I find it a much more interesting and creative medium to curate for that the constraints produce innovation and fun. Whereas on the Internet, every page is the same. It’s a template.”

On the future: “We want to continue to develop work in print and on the web. But we want to lead with print as a beautiful standalone document.”

On what keeps him up at night: “Worrying about the magazine and its success. There’s always something to worry about.”

*The first issue of The Fabulist, art by Sergiu Grapa.*

To learn more about The Fabulist or to order a subscription please click here.

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Josh Wilson, editor and publisher, The Fabulist:

Samir Husni: First, congratulations on the new magazine.

Josh Willson: Thank you.

Samir Husni: Anybody that launches a print magazine today deserves to be congratulated.

Josh Wilson: Thank you.

Samir Husni: Tell me, what’s the story of The Fabulist?

Josh Wilson: The story of The Fabulist

Well, way back in 2007, I kept getting my stories declined by magazines, and I decided to start a little blog, just a website where I could put my stories and those of my friends. About six months later, we began getting submissions, which was very strange because I never posted a submissions link.

People would just email us their stories. It turned out that we had been listed in a writer’s market called Duotrope. I don’t know who put us there, but we ended up in this writer’s market, and the submissions have been coming constantly since then, far more than we can deal with, and usually better than my own stories.

I took down all my stories and, for a long time, posted new work whenever we could get around to it. I would say about the mid-teens, 2015, 2016, 2017, we were at a reading event in San Francisco, where we live. I was approached by Elizabeth Gonzales James, who went on to become a novelist. She has two novels out, The Bullet Swallower and Mona at Sea. The Bullet Swallower is being developed for a feature film. She approached me before her first book contract and said, Do I need any help?

I remember being overwhelmed by submissions. I said, I could really use a hand managing all the submissions. She read a gigantic backlog of hundreds of submissions and said, You could do a story a week. Why don’t you?

I said, OK. We went with that. At that point, I realized we really should have a contract.

I contacted other publishers I know and asked them for advice. We made a writer contract. There are a few other steps to this.

One is that I realized there is a big difference between genre and literary journals. We were kind of in both places. The literary journals, you often pay a reading fee and don’t get paid for your work, to the extent that I would send a submission’s call to creative writing and MFA programs and get the department chairs sending me their work for this blog.

But the genre magazines, Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, Asimov’s magazine, these all came out of the pulp era. There was a very strong writer’s advocacy movement. A lot of that business was pretty fast and loose. In the genre world, you don’t pay reading fees. You always pay the writers.

We decided we should at least do an honorarium. We grew that from $25 to $100 per story. Still operating at a loss. All digitally.

Finally, the final chapter for this evolution, in 2023, in the depths of the COVID pandemic, we were, I guess at the end of the worst of it. A colleague of mine here in San Francisco, Jennifer Joseph from Manic D Press, a great local imprint that has their work collected in the Library of Congress, their LGBTQ work, said that she’s going to AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. This was in Seattle.

Did I want to share a table, an exhibitor table at the book fair? I thought, yes, why not? I did that rashly because I didn’t have anything to sell because it was all digital, but I realized the contract that we had been using enabled us to make books. So I got an $80 color printer and began making chapbooks. And my colleague, our art director, Adam Myers, is a gentleman of very high production values.

We produced some beautiful books and they sold. They almost sold out. And I realized that print really was something people were attracted to and aspired to be a part of.

For several years we printed chapbooks, short 20, 30, 40, 50 pages, saddle stitched, single story publications. Then we began to think through our model and what we could do with it, which brought us around to this print magazine. I’m surprised to see that it’s really gaining traction.

This is after months of agonizing and product development. We got a small grant from CLMP, Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, to hire a digital marketing specialist. Lots of thoughts about how to convert from a weekly digital blog to an issue-based periodical.

I started out in print in the 1993 – 1995 period. I’m a journalist who worked at SF Gate in San Francisco and never went back to print until now. And it’s been a pleasure. I’m also amazed to find that readers and writers and everybody else is thrilled to see print happening.

So that’s where we are. I guess that’s a little bit of a long intro.

Samir Husni: In 2025, it looks like a lot of independent publishers, like yourself, are rediscovering print and bringing print magazines to the market.You were born from the digital womb, bringing The Fabulist to print. Tell me, if you are going to give an elevator pitch about what The Fabulist is, what would you tell people?

Josh Wilson: My elevator pitch for The Fabulist is that we’re a literary, a speculative literature magazine. We publish fantasy and science fiction.

But with a literary bent, a magic realist bent, there’s a lot of interest in what’s been called new weird and new fabulism. And we feel that there’s a lot of terrain that is undeveloped for speculative fiction and speculative literature, poetry and art that doesn’t quite fit in genre. Genre has a lot of straight expectations.

We feel that there’s a lot more room to develop this stuff, that we don’t want to be constrained by the expectations of the market, that certainly there’s no limit to the work being produced — the fantastical work that’s not realist fiction, that’s not straight genre, that sometimes sits in between. And it needs a place, a beautiful home. We tried to develop that beautiful home on the Internet, and it worked.

We have a brand. We’re an established presence. But we didn’t have a business model.

I find that digital monetization is very, very hard, and it’s amazing to me that print from the previous millennium, the previous century, turns out to be a viable business model. I guess that’s longer than an elevator pitch.

Samir Husni: It’s a very tall building.

Josh Wilson: Yes. We’re on the way up.

Samir Husni: Your business model is based on giving subscribers, a free complimentary zero issue or a dummy copy. So what’s the idea behind this business model, giving the one issue free for people who subscribe and then billing them technically per issue?

Josh Wilson: Yes. Two reasons.

First, the per issue billing was something I observed and we observed in Patreon. It’s a creator’s platform. It’s like Kickstarter, but you make your contributions serially over time. And musicians and artists and so on use it and every month you pay $2 or $10 or whatever and you get a new song or a new story or a new piece of art. So, that seemed like a really viable model.

It’s been of interest in the journalism world as well, this monthly income. Rather than having it all happen at once in a cluster annually, it gives the reader a lot of flexibility to exit without having to make a full commitment. So, we decided, we tried a Patreon account and it did work, but we get double hit with fees.

Patreon takes 3% or 5% and the credit card company takes a percent, and we really wanted to reduce that friction. So, we are selling subscriptions without Patreon. We are going with a bimonthly for now and we hope to increase to monthly. So that’s why we’re billing per issue.

And the free issue was our marketing consultant, a gentleman named Neal Gorenflo. He is a marketing guy. He started a publication himself called Shareable, Shareable.net and it covered the sharing economy when that was first coming up.

He’s a very astute and accomplished marketing person who said, you got to have a free offer. You got to have a no risk trial. And we already knew we were going to forge ahead with the print periodical and had made this issue zero.

You called it a dummy. It is a viable standalone issue. But we wanted to just see what we could do with print.

I had a whole bunch of those, you know, in a box on our shelf in our spacious corporate offices here. I thought, okay, let’s do it. Let’s use these.

I had to do another print run. We ran out. It’s been so popular.

I’m going down to San Jose to a printer a little later today to pick up another 150 copies.

Samir Husni: One of the things about print is you must do more curation than digital. As an experienced journalist, how is your curation takes place or the difference between accepting something for digital or accepting something for print?

Josh Wilson: We remain really concerned about quality control the whole way through. So, we did not and we never wanted to treat the Internet as a disposable medium where we could just throw stuff.

We always had a long review process. How will this look in our pages? How much work does the story need? It starts with whether we love it and we want to see it flourish. And if we love it, we’ll commit to it.

I would not say that we’re treating the Internet as more of an easy medium to throw stuff into.

There are space considerations in print, which makes the curation process more interesting. What order do the stories go in? What’s the effect of reading them in order? Each piece of art and its positioning, the layout.

I find it a much more interesting and creative medium to curate for, because the constraints produce innovation and fun. Whereas on the Internet, every page is the same. It’s a template.

We try to make it beautiful and we’re going to do a design refresh and get that website up to speed. But, although it is a boundless medium, it is ironically much more constrained, I think, than print. Because you can’t do an interesting layout.

For all its dynamism, it’s much harder to make it an art piece. And with this print magazine, we want to make an art piece. This is collectible.

Samir Husni: When’s your first issue coming out?

Josh Wilson: January. We had to push it back because of the two holidays, there’s no way we can get the proof back. And then everybody’s going out of state at the end of December.

So mid-January, we aim to have that out and then bi-monthly afterwards. I was just looking at the new cover and it’s great. It’s quite different, too.

Samir Husni: Is there any question I’m supposed to ask you, that I did not ask you?

Josh Wilson: I suppose you could ask me about the state of genre and literary publishing in print and online. I find that fascinating and something I’ve gone deep into over the summer, although I might talk a little bit.

Samir Husni: So tell me about the competition. Who’s out there?

Josh Wilson: The interesting thing is a realization that the folks here aren’t competing. The audience for written-text genre fiction, fantasy and science fiction mostly, and the stuff that spills out over into the literary edges of that, is substantial and undiscovered and undeveloped.

There are a lot of conventions and conferences that happen nationally and globally, science fiction and fantasy conventions and comic book and movie conventions and the ones that are game conventions. And there’s some overlap, some Venn diagram overlap, but the literary conferences are tiny. The World Science Fiction Convention, where they give out the Hugo Awards, it’s one of the highest awards in genre fiction, only gets about 8 to 10,000 attendees, whereas Comic Con in San Diego or Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia gets tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of attendees.

These people do read books, maybe not a full percentage of them. But a lot of people are genre fans without ever knowing that they’re genre readers. They watch movies, they watch TV, they love Star Trek, they love Star Wars. They’ll follow the movies and the characters.

The same is true in the literary world. When I was at AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Conferences conference in LA, we covered all our expenses, including travel and conference registration and housing. We covered all our costs.

A lot of it was these young MFAs walking up to our table and realizing that they could do genre, that they weren’t stuck in a realist, forgive the term, a realist ghetto. There was a lot of room for them to follow their interest and desires.

We broadly feel that the audience is vast and undeveloped. And there isn’t a national, there aren’t national scale, mass media scale consumer magazines. They’re more literary journals.

So, we’re all working together. And there’s a lot of great ones. Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, Analog are all the warhorses from the pulp era.

There’s a host of amazing online magazines that sometimes have print as well. Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare magazine, Strange Horizons, and Uncanny magazine are really sort of among the top tier of these online magazines that do issues in e-books. And sometimes audio books as well.

But also release all the stories for free on the web. So, there’s this freemium model. And then they’ll do print on demand for print.

I think we may be distinct in really going, switching hard to print first. The editor of, publisher of Clarkesworld, Neil Clarke, who’s an analyst of the industry and an accomplished publisher, pointed out that he goes where the readers are. He has an audio book version.

The people who listen to audio books are different from the ones who read online or who read e-books even. They’re all distinct. And he has a print on demand magazine.

We may be, The Fabulist, may be taking a risk on going so hard on print first. But we are at break-even. We, in about three or four weeks, we sold more than 100 subscriptions with an online ad campaign.

And it’s very interesting to realize that we have such a latent audience. We were getting one to five subscriptions every day. And the subscription drive ends tomorrow.

We’re going to assess, redesign it, redeploy it around our issue one with the new cover. The fact that you must go where the readers are is, as Neil (Clarke) says, is absolutely true. And we want to do audio books.

We can do e-books. And we want to continue to develop work in print and on the web. But we want to lead with print as a beautiful standalone document. This is a distinction.

There’s another magazine, Reckoning magazine, that also does a beautiful print document. And then eyedroppers out their content for free. I feel that that’s an exciting approach that you can do because audiences don’t overlap. Digital is a loss leader. And digital content enters social media and the Internet as a sort of promotional mechanism for your publication.

The print people who are repeatedly exposed to it, they realize they want the magazine. Although there’s a specific strategy we did. We have a landing page.

We show off all the interiors. We boast about the contributors. Try to showcase our production values.

Samir Husni: My typical last two questions. If I come uninvited to your home one evening, what do I catch Josh doing? Cooking, having a glass of wine, watching TV, reading a book?

Josh Wilson: I’m cooking. I love to cook. I’m feeding other people. I want them all to eat, so I try to do a good job.

And I’m usually listening to an audio book while I’m cooking, because I can’t read it. Right now, I’m listening to Barbara Tuchman, the historian.

She’s got a great book called The March of Folly about governments doing stupid things over time. After dinner, ideally, everybody else cleans up and I go back to work.

Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night these days?

Josh Wilson: Worrying about the magazine and its success. There’s always something to worry about. But I have been sufficiently exhausted that I usually fall asleep quickly.

I’m reading a great book that is keeping me up. It’s a new version of The Tempest, Shakespeare’s Tempest. It’s called Kalivas by the author Nick Mamatas, who is one of our book reviewers.

And it’s in the future. And there’s been a cataclysm. And Caliban/Kalivas lives on the Farallon Islands off San Francisco.

His mother was a nanotech Sycorax. The witch was a nanotech engineer. And Prospero is a techno magnate in this post-human society who invades the island and colonizes it.

And it’s a romp. It’s a great read. That’s been keeping me up a little too late.

Samir Husni: Excellent. Thank you and good luck.

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The Week Junior: The UK Successful Magazine That Is Meant To Be Read. The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Anna Bassi, Editorial Director

November 21, 2025

Ten years ago, a new magazine was born in the UK: The Week Junior. A news weekly for children that saw a “proper return to things being print-first, magazines being print-first, and not just a vehicle for a toy.” Anna Bassi is the editorial director of the magazine. She has been at the magazine since its launch and is still as passionate about The Week Junior as she was on day one.

Anna Bassi’s work with children’s magazines started over 30 years ago. After 20 years of editing such magazines, she got disillusioned with children’s magazines. She left the field of children’s magazine publishing because “I had a growing realization that we were spending more money on the cover mounts, and less and less money on the content,” Ms. Bassi told me.

She added, “I’d see children, grabbing their magazines, tearing the toy off the front, chucking the magazine on the floor, and it couldn’t even be looked at. And it was just, and we spent so much time talking about the packaging for the toy, it had to look as though it could be shop-bought. And then the budget for the editorial content would be halved and halved again every year.”

Then, something like magic happened. She was recruited to launch The Week Junior magazine, “a great thing to be involved in.” She told me, “It’s a joy to be working on something where the investment actually is in the content and nothing else. It’s a real privilege.”

To read the story of this privilege, please join me in this conversation with Anna Bassi, editorial director, The Week Junior, in the UK, but first, the soundbites:

Science & Nature, Science, Nature, Lab, staff, employees, the week junior

On reading on paper: “The experience of reading on paper is so very different to reading on a screen, and it’s increasingly the case now, so perhaps we’re a little bit ahead of ourselves back in 2015.”

On the role of the magazine: “We can create news that is made for children, and that didn’t mean that we wouldn’t address important or complicated or serious issues, it just meant that we would do it in a way that was very clear for our readers, like a conversation with them.”

On the tone of the magazine: “One of the principles of the magazine is not to be a teacher, it’s a conversation. We’re trying to have a conversation with the child, we’re trying to meet them where they are, and if anything, we’re the slightly smarter, older sibling of our average aged 10-year-old reader.”

On the content of the magazine: “There’s something around the way a print magazine is curated, that thought that goes into which story goes where, which picture goes where, how a child experiences a page, which is very different to the on-screen experience.”

On launching during a crisis: “There’s something about launching into an adverse situation. It pulls teams together, and it clarifies the purpose of the magazine.”

On her ten-year journey: “There have been loads of challenges, but it’s been, I should say it’s been great fun more than anything else. It’s just an honor and a privilege to do something like this, to create a magazine for children.”

On the many extensions of The Week Junior: “We have a lot of extensions. We’ve been very busy. The first extension was the launch of The Week Junior Science and Nature magazine in 2018.”

On more extensions: “We launched a podcast in 2019 called The Week Junior show, which is still released every week, we just recorded our 10th birthday episode this morning.”

On her advice to someone launching a magazine: “Do your research, know your audience, respect your audience, I think is key.”

On the design of the magazine: “We needed to do to be different, but also to be useful, was to make a magazine that was genuinely accessible. So, it is designed to be read. The way the pages are laid out is very deliberate. It’s about being able to navigate that page easily. You know where it begins and where it ends.”

On what keeps her up at night: “Not so much these days. Sometimes the news keeps me up at night, I do worry.”

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Anna Bassi, editorial director, The Week Junior, in the UK.

Samir Husni: You just celebrated 10 years of The Week Junior, tell me about the genesis of the magazine. Why would you start a print news weekly for children in this digital age?

Anna Bassi: It seems like a crazy idea, doesn’t it? The origin of The Week Junior dates back more than 10 years, in fact even before my time with it. I was the launch editor here in the UK, but there has been around a year’s worth of development work on the idea prior to me joining. It had been born from the realization that The Week magazine, which obviously is also a UK publication, had many schools subscribing to it for their secondary school age pupils, so these are kids who are 12 years and over, and it became increasingly clear that perhaps there was an opportunity there to bring news to a younger audience, and to do so in print, which seemed counterintuitive at the time, but all of us who work on the magazine, and all of those who are involved in the development of it, appreciate that tangible quality of a paper magazine.

The experience of reading on paper is so very different to reading on a screen, and it’s increasingly the case now, so perhaps we’re a little bit ahead of ourselves back in 2015. Parents now are realizing that screen time is addictive, that it can be counterproductive. It doesn’t have to be an either-or situation, but that there are real benefits to children not spending quite so much time on screen, so we felt they would appreciate that offer of an alternative to the screen.

For children, because most of us readers are subscribers, it’s something they own, when you look at something on screen, you don’t own it, it’s fleeting, it’s gone, and you can get lost quite easily as well. Also, you are not experiencing the same depth. Finally there’s something around the way a print magazine is curated, that thought that goes into which story goes where, which picture goes where, how a child experiences a page, which is very different to the on-screen experience, which is good in its own right and has many benefits, but this idea of something being put together with real care and thought as to how a child will read and see and experience what we’re giving to them.

Samir Husni: When you launched the magazine, when the first issue came out, was it an instant success?

Anna Bassi: Well, we had about 5,000 subscribers before we launched, we’d marketed it exclusively through The Week magazine in the UK, and when we launched, we thought that most of our readers would be the children of The Week readers, but as it turned out, it was a bit of a word-of-mouth success, those early subscribers were real advocates for the magazine and shared it with their friends who bought it for their parents.

The first issue was a launch into the unknown, because there was a lot of rhetoric around kids not loving print and why would they want to know about the news, that’s just for adults. But that was also part of the reason why we launched, that there was an assumption that news is just for grown-ups, but actually children do see and hear the news, whether it’s an overheard conversation or they might have heard something on the radio or on the TV, and sometimes having that partial information is worse than having no information, so our thought was we can take control of this and we can create news that is made for children, and that didn’t mean that we wouldn’t address important or complicated or serious issues, it just meant that we would do it in a way that was very clear for our readers, like a conversation with them.

One of the principles of the magazine is not to be a teacher, it’s a conversation. We’re trying to have a conversation with the child, we’re trying to meet them where they are, and if anything, we’re the slightly smarter, older sibling of our average aged 10-year-old reader.

Our first issue put us to the test. We planned a wonderful celebration launch issue, and in fact the week before we launched the magazine, there were a series of terrible terror attacks in Paris. We had to tear up our plans and lead with that as our cover story, which was very difficult to do, but it also meant that we very quickly had to live up to the promise that we’d made to ourselves and to our new subscribers, that we wouldn’t shy away from the difficult stuff.

We quickly were able to establish the blueprint for telling those sorts of stories, which we’ve unfortunately had to use many times since, but it’s been enormously helpful.

Samir Husni: There are similarities between the launch of The Week Junior in the UK and The Week Junior in the US that was ready to launch when Covid hit…

Anna Bassi: Terrible echoes of it. The same thing happened, we were working away, preparing for that first issue to launch. We wheeled out the celebration cover that we planned for the UK launch, and again, it all had to be torn up and started all over.

There’s something about launching into an adverse situation. It pulls teams together, and it clarifies the purpose of the magazine. Many parents here in the UK and then obviously later in the US were incredibly grateful to The Week Junior for being that voice of calm and clarity in a somewhat kind of chaotic and catastrophic environment.

Samir Husni: So those 10 years, has it been a walk in a rose garden or you had some challenges?

Anna Bassi: There have been loads of challenges, but it’s been, I should say it’s been great fun more than anything else. It’s just an honor and a privilege to do something like this, to create a magazine for children.

There have been many challenges and obviously the news agenda has been difficult around the world. There have been conflicts, pandemics, and political upheavals. I don’t think there’s ever a week when there isn’t a story that we really have to sit quietly with before we can begin to tell it.

Covid was both a challenge and an opportunity because we all had to retreat to our homes with our laptops and find a new way of working, we’d always worked together in an office prior to that, we also had to rip up all the plans we had for content that we planned around live events and interactive experiences and places that kids could go to and completely redraw our planning for the whole year and base that around what can you do from your home or within a very small local environment.

One of the things that we launched in 2020 was our summer of reading campaign, which we knew that that summer many kids were not going to be going anywhere much further than their back garden or the local park, there would not be holidays, experiences would be limited, and books present that opportunity to escape the everyday, to get out of your world, to meet new people, to find new places.

We launched a summer of reading campaign encouraging children to read through the summer and tell us about what they’ve been reading. That was a challenge that became an opportunity that became a success. We ran it for four years here in the UK, I think it’s still running in the US. The only reason we stopped running it here in the UK is because we launched our own children’s book awards and that then took the place of the summer of reading challenge.

Samir Husni: You had so many extensions, you’re not limited just to the weekly magazine, can you tell me about those extensions?

Anna Bassi: We have a lot of extensions. We’ve been very busy. The first extension was the launch of The Week Junior Science and Nature magazine in 2018. That’s a monthly magazine here in the UK that was born out of the revelation from research that we’d done with our readers that what they really wanted more of was more science and more animals, so we thought why not launch a magazine that’s just all about science and animals, so that’s now entering its seventh year.

We launched a puzzle magazine in late 2019, unfortunately that didn’t survive the pandemic, it wasn’t a subscription magazine, it was run on newsstands sales and that collapsed during the lockdowns. We launched a podcast in 2019 called The Week Junior show, which is still released every week, we just recorded our 10th birthday episode this morning.

We have a book publishing deal with Bloomsbury in the UK and internationally. We’ve so far published five books with them. We’ve published two novelty gift books. We’ve published two guides so far; a guide to the environment and a guide to politics, and we’ve got money and sports coming out next year.

We launched our book awards which we’ve been running now since 2023. We held our third book awards event at the end of September this year and that’s become a huge industry gathering now. That’s a children’s book publishing world here in the UK, and it’s been enormous fun to develop and launch it with the help of the events team at Future (The Week Junior’s publisher).

What else is there? Of course, we launched in the US in 2020. We have newsletters, we have endless ideas, we have a digital edition, we’re still playing around with social media and seeing what more we can do there with video and so on. There’s still plenty more to come.

Samir Husni: You sound very positive on the future.

Anna Bassi: I am.

Samir Husni: Do you think we are seeing an increase in print? We’ve seen a lot of print magazines coming to the marketplace more than last year and the year before. Suddenly people are rediscovering print. Do you think that trend will continue or is just a nostalgic fad?

Anna Bassi: I think it will continue. I feel very positive about it.

There’s a return to valuing, to go back to what I was saying in the beginning, something that’s tangible. You see the same thing happening with music. The sales of vinyl and CDs are going up. My own children like collecting vinyl and CDs and they like paper as well, so I feel positive about it.

Although the magazine market, and I don’t know what the situation is in the US, but certainly here in the UK, the number of magazines is fewer. Several companies have closed and a lot of titles have closed over the years. Those that are left, there’s a passion for them and there’s a recognition that if you can produce something that’s of a high quality, which The Week Junior is, and you invest in making something that is genuinely worth having, people will be prepared to pay for it and they will value it. There’s a renaissance coming. I’m very excited about it.

Samir Husni: If somebody comes to you and said, Anna, I want to start a new magazine. What advice would you give them?

Anna Bassi: Do your research, know your audience, respect your audience, I think is key.

Think about what they care about, make sure that you’re really feeding their interests, make sure that what you do can be trusted. Trust is a big and important thing these days, especially in the time of fake news and AI and all the rest of it. So do it well.

If you’re a publisher, be prepared to invest in it. These things aren’t cheap. And if you’re going to do it well, you have to be prepared to spend money to do it well and it will pay back.

Samir Husni: Excellent. So, tell me, is there any question I needed to ask you that I didn’t ask you so far?

Anna Bassi: I can tell you a little bit about the way The Week Junior has been designed, which is interesting and important and has been a factor in our success as well.

When we launched here in the UK, we launched into a very busy marketplace. At that time there were many, many children’s magazines. The newsstands were an absolute riot of color.

Many magazines had cover mounts with plastic toys and characters, Disney magazines, Thomas the Tank Engine. So a very crowded place. And we launched with a very simple magazine with no cover mounts, which didn’t have a brand that was recognizable to kids.

And it wasn’t a kind of a riot inside, in the same way as many of those magazines are. Many of them, their design, they look beautiful. They’re very appealing.

They’re obviously very brand led as well. And what we knew we needed to do to be different, but also to be useful, was to make a magazine that was genuinely accessible. So, it is designed to be read.

The way the pages are laid out is very deliberate. It’s about being able to navigate that page easily. You know where it begins and where it ends.

There are also multiple entry points to every single article. There are fun facts, and there are sidebars, and there are boxes. And all of those are there to help lure in the child who may be the reluctant reader.

The child that doesn’t want to read something long, but they might read something that’s short and funny. And then maybe that will tempt them to read something else and get more involved.

We also consulted guidelines around designing printed materials for people who are dyslexic. So we chose the fonts very carefully.

And the fact that most of our type is black on white, or a very light tinted background, is also led by that set of guidelines. So everything that we’ve done, every word is obviously incredibly carefully thought about. Every picture is very carefully thought about.

The layout itself is fundamental. That’s the secret sauce. It might look plain to eyes that are accustomed to other children’s magazines, but it’s read.

It has been read since day one by kids whose parents will tell us, my child doesn’t like reading, or my child has always struggled with reading. They love reading Junior.

I’ve been working in children’s magazines for almost 30 years now. I’ve been through all of that I’ve done, I’ve made those magazines that are a riot of color with crazy typography, and things splattered all over the place. I look back at it now, And I think, I thought I was doing the right thing. But I wasn’t helping any children to read.

Samir Husni: If I come one evening to your home unannounced, what do I catch Anna doing, reading a book, watching TV, cooking, having a glass of wine?

Anna Bassi: All the above.

But also, two years ago, I moved into the house that I’m in now. And it’s been an enormous renovation job. So you’d probably find me if I’m not cooking, eating, drinking wine, or watching TV, or reading a book, which I don’t really do enough of. I’m usually scouring auction sites and eBay, and furniture recycling schemes for pieces of furniture that I can pick up and place in my house.

Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night these days?

Anna Bassi: What keeps me up at night? Not so much these days. Sometimes the news keeps me up at night, I do worry.

Whenever a big and upsetting news story breaks, I wonder, how are we going to do this? How are we going to tell it? Are we going to tell it? That will keep me awake at night. And then in a positive way, I guess I can be kept awake with ideas, new ideas for doing new things in new ways.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

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The Birth Of A Dummy… Magazine, That Is. The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With John Kelly, Publisher And Editor of Dummy Magazine.

September 19, 2025

John F. Kelly fell in love with comics at age 10. He was so fascinated by Air Pirates Funnies that he dedicated the second issue of his new magazine, Dummy, to the Air Pirates. His story reminded me a lot of my own childhood in Lebanon, when I first discovered Superman at the same age that he discovered Air Pirates Funnies.

John went on to become a writer, a marketer, an educator, and later in life, an editor and publisher of a new magazine he aptly named Dummy. In the magazine industry, the term “dummy” refers to a prototype edition of a publication. He had originally been showing the prototype of his magazine and referred to it as the Pee-Wee Playhouse zine prototype—essentially, the dummy issue. And thus, Dummy magazine was born.

As a comics historian, John uses Dummy to explore comics history one subject at a time. In addition to the magazine, he also hosts a YouTube channel called DummyZine. I had the pleasure of interviewing John, where we talked about his love for print, his views on comics and their history, the impact of new technologies such as AI, and the reasons many are returning to print as independent publishers in this digital age.

So, without any further ado, please join me in this pleasant conversation with an editor and publisher that reminded me of myself falling in love with comics and transitioning to magazines.

Enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ Interview with John Kelly, publisher and editor of Dummy magazine. But first, the soundbites:

On what is Dummy magazine: “It’s a comics history publication that I focus on one particular topic for each issue.”

On why he launched Dummy: “I missed the printed magazine, holding something in my hand that had something that I spent a long time writing about and researching.”

On naming the magazine Dummy: “I was taking out this Pee-Wee’s Playhouse zine and showing it to them and saying, here’s the dummy of my new zine, my new Pee-Wee’s Playhouse zine. And that’s just what I was calling it because I started in printing and publishing, and that was just a term that I was familiar with.”

On the resurgence of print in this digital age: “There’s an analog movement for different people in this country and in the world. We consume so much information online. Print is like taking a break medium. I think that’s part of it.”

On the difference between issue one and two: “It was very important to me to have it look like a real magazine, so that there was a much more of a disciplined approach to it than my, let’s just throw this thing together, first issue. The second issue, which took a lot longer, in part was also tracking down the art.”

On his love for Air Pirates Funnies since he was a kid: “I opened Air Pirates Funnies number one and looked inside and saw, ah, this is not Mickey Mouse. This is not the Mickey Mouse that I know. They’re doing something very different here. And so from that point on, I’ve been really puzzled and fascinated by the Air Pirates. This was my chance to explore that deeper.”

On his view about AI: “I don’t really consider any technology a foe. I think things can be misused. Anything can be misused, and AI certainly misuses a lot of things.”

More on his views on AI: “Most of my friends are cartoonists or artists or writers. I’m a writer myself. The threat of AI stealing the intellectual property of artists and other people, plus other issues beyond that, makes it extremely dangerous and something that is theft.”

On his advice to start a new magazine: “It’s very difficult and very expensive, but that’s not a reason not to do it, right?”

On what he does to rewind: “I don’t really rewind. I’m working all of the time.”

On what keeps him up at night: “Nothing. I sleep great. I take care of myself. I eat well. I exercise. I’m doing something I absolutely love to do. I’m completely content with everything.”

And now for the lightly edited Mr. Magazine™ Interview with John Kelly, publisher and editor of Dummy magazine:

Samir Husni: Give me the elevator pitch of this new magazine, Dummy.

John Kelly: Well, it’s a funny story. The elevator pitch, I guess, would be that it’s a comics history publication that I focus on one particular topic for each issue, and the guideline for what that topic is, is that it’s something that I’m extremely interested in, maybe I know something about it, but I want to know a lot more.

So by doing the research in the writing and putting it all together, I do a very deep dive on that topic so that I educate myself about it. And as a result, when it’s printed, others can also learn what I’ve learned.

Samir Husni: What’s the genesis of the magazine and why did you decide to call it Dummy?

John Kelly: It’s a funny backstory because I was not planning on doing this at all.

I’ve been writing about comics history for many years. I’ve been writing for The Comics Journal magazine since the late 1980s or early 1990s, but more than 35 years. And I’ve written many, many pieces for that publication.

In recent years, as magazines, the printed magazines, have mostly disappeared, including, for the most part, The Comics Journal. They do a print publication occasionally. Most of my pieces have only existed online, and I was just kind of getting sick of that.

I missed the printed magazine, holding something in my hand that had something that I spent a long time writing about and researching. I’d written many pieces, and they only existed somewhere out there on the internet. I love printed materials.

I certainly am of the age that I grew up with them, and I wanted to put together something for myself. I chose to do that first issue on the Art of the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse show because I knew the people who were involved in that process, and I had seen all their archival material many times. So, I put together, really just for myself, a printed publication about that story, and I brought it to a friend’s house.

He had a color copy machine, and I had laid it out in InDesign and quickly put it together, brought over some flats to his house. We printed out the pages, folded, stapled them, and there it was. I held it in my hand, and I was very happy, and I thought that would be it.

I thought that I was making one copy just for myself because it was something that I wanted to do. Then people started seeing it. I was showing it to them, and I was saying, you know the term dummy in printing? It refers to a prototype publication. I was taking out this Pee-Wee’s Playhouse zine and showing it to them and saying, here’s the dummy of my new zine, my new Pee-Wee’s Playhouse zine. And that’s just what I was calling it because I started in printing and publishing, and that was just a term that I was familiar with.

More and more people wanted copies of it, so I thought I would print up a couple of them. I wanted to give a copy to the people who I had interviewed, to Gary Panter and Mark Newgarden and Kaz and Wayne White and Ric Heitzman. I wanted to send them copies for their own, and I thought I would print up 10 copies of it.

But more people learned about it and they wanted copies, so I, reluctantly, decided that I would print up a hundred copies of it. And the last thing that I did before I sent the files to the printer was, I thought, well it’s got to have a name, you know? I just don’t want to call it the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse zine? I wanted to call it something, and I liked the name Dummy. It was stupid and it had a secondary meaning to it, so I thought it was kind of funny to call a magazine Dummy.

Very quickly, maybe in 90 seconds, I composed the logotype for that name for the masthead title and just slapped it on to the magazine at the last moment. I was printing a hundred copies thinking that it would take me 10 years to get rid of them, that they would be in boxes in my basement forever. Then I posted one little thing on my Facebook page saying, hey, I made up some copies of this.

If you want one, just contact me. And they sold out in two hours. They were all gone immediately.

I was like, wow. Then the money from selling those copies allowed me to print 300 more, and those sold out immediately too. Then since then, I’ve just been reprinting them and still today, I still get orders for that copy.

That’s basically how it all started, but it was not something that was planned. I’m extremely happy that there are people out there who want it, who want a printed publication. I didn’t realize that there as many people out there, like me, who missed print and the printed matter. I’m happy that they exist.

Samir Husni: Why do you think is this resurgence of the independent return to print?

John Kelly: There’s an analog movement for different people in this country and in the world.

We consume so much information online. Print is like taking a break medium. I think that’s part of it. There’s a novelty aspect to it too, that people are not expecting a printed publication that’s well printed, produced, and designed as possible.

I want it to be a beautiful piece that people can look at. I can only say personally, I absolutely hate reading long things online. I’m getting older, maybe that has something to do with it.

My eyesight is failing and the chore of reading something online that is extremely long and complicated. I just won’t do it, and that includes my own work. I still write for The Comics Journal, and I tend to write very long pieces, one of the things that prompted me to really embrace doing a publication again, myself, was that I would say I wouldn’t even read my pieces online because they’re too long.

Not that because they’re bad, but just because there’s too long, and you get distracted. You get pulled away from something and you think, well, I’ll go back to that. Then you’re bombarded with 9 million other things that take you away from it.

You end up two years later thinking, oh, there was something that I wanted to read. If you have the printed thing, you can read part of it, put it down, read it again. And if you like it, you can save it and read it years from now.

Samir Husni: Your journey from issue one to issue two, has it been a walk in a rose garden or you had some issues?

John Kelly: No, no, no, no, no. With the first issue, since I wasn’t expecting it to exist, I probably designed that issue very quickly. I have rudimentary InDesign skills and layout skills.

I can get by to do like a mock-up of something. I’ve been using Adobe products since they came out, so I know how to use them. Also the subject matter for that first issue, the looseness of the art of the Pee Wee Herman program really worked well with my somewhat laissez-faire design for that issue, right? Once I was going to do a second issue, I wanted to really step it up and make it as beautiful as I possibly could.

All the images in the second issue are scanned at very high resolution from primary sources, so either the original art or usually a very rare, printed publication. There’s a lot of work that goes into cleaning up those images and having them color corrected and presented on the page so that they look like the actual artifact, like you could reach down and pick it up off the page.

That’s what I was going for, at least. It was very important to me to have it look like a real magazine, so that there was a much more of a disciplined approach to it than my, let’s just throw this thing together, first issue. The second issue, which took a lot longer, in part was also tracking down the art.

There were specific pieces of art that I wanted for that issue that took a long time to find, like who owned the originals for this piece, who had the original piece or who had a copy of this thing that there’s maybe three copies in existence. Getting that and then scanning it and working with the it took a long time, but in the end, it was worth it. Also, the Air Pirates story is a very complicated story.

It’s an extremely complicated story that I don’t think has been captured in the way that I’ve done in this issue. So, there were a lot of moving parts and a lot of people that I was talking to from the Air Pirates and around the Air Pirates for that issue. I wanted to make sure that I said that story as well as I possibly could.

Samir Husni: Judging by the poster above your chair, you’re an Air Pirates fan?

John Kelly: Oh yeah, sure. The Air Pirates have been very important to me since I was a little boy. I first saw copies of Air Pirates one and two when I was 10 years old and I was over a friend’s house. This friend had an older brother who was a junior or senior in high school.

He had a stash of underground comics hidden in his room that I knew about. When I would be over their house and when the brother wasn’t around, I would sneak into his room and go through the comics and look at them. I was way younger than I should have been looking at those things. But mixed in with the guy’s copies of Zap and Freak Brothers and some other underground comics were these like Mickey Mouse comic books.

At first, I didn’t know what they were. To me, they were just like regular Mickey Mouse comic books. That’s what they look like to me.

I paid no attention to them. But I wondered why those were there? Why were these Mickey Mouse comic books in there with these dirty comic books? And eventually I opened Air Pirates Funnies number one and looked inside and saw, ah, this is not Mickey Mouse. This is not the Mickey Mouse that I know.

They’re doing something very different here. And so from that point on, I’ve been really puzzled and fascinated by the Air Pirates.

This was my chance to explore that deeper.

Samir Husni: We live in a digital age and AI is everywhere now. Do you consider AI a friend or a foe of the printed matter?

John Kelly: I don’t really consider any technology a foe. I think things can be misused. Anything can be misused, and AI certainly misuses a lot of things.

Most of my friends are cartoonists or artists or writers. I’m a writer myself. The threat of AI stealing the intellectual property of artists and other people, plus other issues beyond that, makes it extremely dangerous and something that is theft.

I agree with those friends of mine who absolutely hate it and don’t want it in their lives. They don’t want their artwork stolen and reconfigured and used for other purposes without their permission. I completely understand that, and I support that.

That said, AI is a lot more than just that. That’s a bad side of what it does. I don’t think we were recording this, but when we first started, you were talking about how you do your transcriptions and that’s an AI process. That’s helpful.

That’s extremely helpful. There are other things that AI can do that is beneficial.

So, I am not 100 percent against it, because in theory it can be a very useful tool. I remember when desktop publishing was first starting, that was a threat to people who were publishing in the earlier, more traditional ways.

Society adapted to the new technology and now it’s what’s used. I still love the old methods of printing. I print a lot of things on a letterpress machine.

I love the fact that I have access to a letterpress, not just one, access to several letterpress machines. And I take advantage of that, and I print things with that technology.

I love the way that they look. It’s not efficient for me to be printing an entire issue of Dummy on a letterpress machine these days. And so it’s offset printed in Chicago and then mailed to me.

I would love it if I had a letterpress machine or some other old-fashioned printer in my basement that I could crank it out whenever I wanted a new copy and do it myself. But, logistically, I’m not able to do that.

So, that’s how I view AI. It can be a very bad thing. In some ways it is a very bad thing. In a lot of ways, it’s a very bad thing.

In other ways, it’s something that we all use, whether we know it or not.

Samir Husni: If someone came to you and says, John, I have this idea of a new magazine, should I go ahead, and do it? Would you tell them, yes? Or you would tell them forget about it.

John Kelly: It’s very difficult and very expensive, but that’s not a reason not to do it, right? It would depend on what their idea was. I hope that because of Dummy and a couple of other newer publications that I really love, I hope a lot more people start doing their own, whatever it is, their own printed thing.

I was just at the Small Press Expo this past weekend in Bethesda, Maryland, and I ran, along with Gary Hallgren, a member of the Air Pirates, we ran a workshop for younger artists on how to make mini-comics, Tijuana Bibles, and how to print your own little publication. We had a jammed session. The session was sold out, and it was great to see all these artists making their own little comics and holding them up and showing them. They were coming up to me afterwards and showing me what they did, and I loved that. I think people should explore whatever channels they can to have their expression created, whether that’s digital, whether it’s printed, whether it’s music, whether it’s painting, anything that they have a passion for.

I would say that I think one of the reasons Dummy is doing well is that it’s really a pure labor of love on my part. I think that’s very important. I’m not doing it because this will, I’m thinking, oh, this is going to make me money, because that’s probably not going to happen. My goal is that it makes enough money that I can keep doing it. So far it is.

The reason to do it is because it’s something I want to do. Each issue of Dummy so far there’s only been two, but subsequent issues, they’re all going to be based on, here’s something that I wish existed, you know, here’s something that I don’t know enough about. As a writer, the only way that I learn, truly learn about something, is through the process of writing about it, through the process of researching it, to talking to the people who were involved in it, and writing the story, and then rewriting, and rewriting, and rewriting, and rewriting, and talking to more people, and then it comes together for me. I’m doing it as, because my focus, my target audience is one person, that’s me.

I’m the target audience. It’s something that I wish that existed, that if I walked into a store and I saw, or if I saw somebody posting about it, I would say, I need that, I’ve been waiting my whole life for that thing, and now it exists. So, if other people feel the same way, that’s great, but I’m doing it for myself, and that’s important for people, and especially doing a printed thing like this, it’s just because you got to really do it, because it’s something that you’re just motivated to do, because you want it to exist.

Samir Husni: Well, John, before I ask you my typical last two questions, is there any question I should have asked you I did not? John Kelly: No, I think you’ve hit all of them so far. I’m having a lot of fun doing this. It’s a lot of work.

It’s a tremendous amount of work. I would say one thing that I wasn’t expecting, I hadn’t really thought about was the amount of work. I sell a lot of copies of the magazine as a result, I’m going to the post every single day, dropping off stuff at the post office to mail out, sometimes two times a day, sometimes three times a day, bringing piles of mailers stuffed with Dummys to the post office, and that’s great. It’s a lot of time.

It’s a lot of time to stuff them into the envelope to get them to look the way that they want to. All the mailers are hand stamped. You know, they have a little note in there.

There’re some extra items. It’s very time consuming. There’re issues with mail delivery at times, especially right now, international mail delivery is really a nightmare.

You take a lot of questions from people about their orders. I also sell t-shirts and other related merchandise. Somebody orders the wrong color or the wrong size. What do you do then? There’s a lot of customer service stuff that takes a lot of time away from the actual writing.

I wasn’t expecting that because I wasn’t expecting any of this. It’s been a real learning experience.

Samir Husni: If I come to visit you one evening, unannounced, what do I catch John doing? Reading a book, watching TV, cooking, having a glass of wine? What do you do to rewind at the end of the day?

John Kelly: I don’t really rewind. I’m working all of the time.

The only I leave the house is I go to the gym every day, early in the morning. I get up really early. I get up around 4, 4:30 in the morning and I start working on Dummy at that point.

I’ll go to the gym around 7:00 or 8:00 am and then I’m working on Dummy or something for The Comics Journal or some other project until my wife and I usually watch about an hour of non-traditional television. It’s like a movie or a documentary or something, maybe an hour and a half of that before I, I usually start falling asleep about 10 minutes into it. Then we’re in bed at 10 or 9 pm.

Samir Husni: What keeps you up at night?

John Kelly: Nothing. I sleep great. I take care of myself. I eat well.

I exercise. I’m doing something I absolutely love to do. I’m completely content with everything.

I’m a very happy person at this point in my life. I don’t think there’s anything that keeps me up at night. Everybody’s life has issues and concerns, and you just deal with them as they come.

I’m like powerless over most things. Usually, I figure out a way to make things work.

Samir Husni: Thank you and good luck.

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