Stack Magazines

Ellen Freeman is the editor of Mildew, the secondhand fashion magazine that's based in Mexico, and which reflects on a whole world of vintage, recycled, and upcycled fashion and art. We delivered the second issue to Stack subscribers in November 2023, and the third issue came out at the end of last year, so I caught up with Ellen recently to find out what’s happened in a year’s worth of independent publishing, including the big change that has seen Mildew officially joining the Broccoli independent publishing empire.

The Lemming is an independent, anti-profit magazine that’s made with a strong DIY ethos, and an even stronger sense of social justice and political activism. In this episode, creative director Gabriel Carr, editor Beth Jones, and political editor Joseph Conway speak about their commitment to telling the truth, rather than telling two sides of a story.

For the first Stack podcast episode of 2025 I spoke with creative director Alex Stevenson and editor-in-chief Chloe Hayman about Soft Stir, the Australian magazine that provides a space for emerging artists and writers to experiment and find their voice.

The second instalment of our podcasts looking back at the magazines we delivered to Stack subscribers in 2024, featuring Serviette (Toronto), Nobody (Berlin), The Fence (London), Get Familiar (Amsterdam) and Pleasant Place (Amsterdam).

We're taking stock of the magazines we delivered to subscribers in 2024. Hear from the editors, designers, and publishers who made Dirty Furniture, Desired Landscapes, Offal, Crude Futures, and A Shade Colder, the magazines we sent out from January to May this year.

Peter Kormanyos is a strategist for TBWA advertising agency in Amsterdam, and he has also published a strange and intriguing new magazine called Purgatory Sandwich. The launch edition is split into two separate issues, which are presented together in a brown paper sandwich bag, promising what it calls, “Experimental fuckaroundery for lunchbreaks”. It's gleefully weird and chaotic, and in this episode he speaks about the ideas behind his creative project.

Les Jones, Molly Campbell and Wilf Jones are the team behind Contemporary Collage Magazine, and they're also father, daughter and son. The magazine started as an online publication, but when readers said they wanted to read in print the team also added a real ink and paper version, and in this episode they speak about how they're running it as a financially sustainable family business.

Rob Orchard is one of the founders and editors of Delayed Gratification magazine, and one of the authors of Misc., a new book they published earlier this month. If you’re a long-time listener to our podcast you might remember that I spoke to Rob three years ago, when the first Delayed Gratification book was published, and as you’ll hear, Misc. has been shaped in large part by that experience. This new book is smaller, cheaper, and more deliberately created for people buying Christmas gifts, but none of that changes the fact that the book market is incredibly competitive and a really tough place to make money. Or as he puts it, “When you publish a book, you buy a ticket in a lottery”.

Magculture Live is coming up fast (Thursday 7th November, at the Vitsoe shop here in London) so I took the opportunity to sit down with Magculture founder Jeremy Leslie and have a long chat about magazine stuff. We spoke about some of the high-profile magazines, like Vice and The Onion, which have recently returned to print. We spoke about changes in magazine design trends, and the forces that can influence those decisions. And there was a lot of love for Richard Turley and his many print projects.

Nicolas Kemper is publisher of New York Review of Architecture, the big, two-colour, newsprint magazine that has become renowned for its long, critical, entertaining essays about architecture and the city. He gave the first talk of the weekend at this year’s Indiecon and I loved his enthusiasm for all parts of publishing – not just the fun stuff like writing, editing, and throwing parties, but also what he calls, “building pipes”; making sure that things like their subscription management and contributor invoicing systems run as efficiently as possible. We're playing his Indiecon talk for this episode of the Stack podcast, so you can hear the story of how he and the team are building through their versions of the magazine.