Best Magazines Ever!

Guys particularly like lists as Miranda Sawyer noted in The Observer a couple of years ago [observer.guardian.co.uk]. Not that women don’t find them interesting, it’s just that guys seem to like them a bit more. Guys take up a lot of space in lists too, this could be because they are mostly written by other guys. Good Magazine have just compiled a list which they are featuring on their website. It ’supposes’ to be a definative list of the ‘Best Magazines Ever!’ [goodmagazine.com/bestmagazinesever]. It’s problematic.

Not that I’m going to go all geeky ‘List Guy’ on this topic… but, yeah… I am. I mean, who were these ‘aficionados’? And why, as ‘eclectic’ as they may have been, was their choice in titles best best summed up by New Yorkers, Print Fetish, [printfetish.com] who described this selection as ‘pedestrian’. As noted on MagCulture [magculture.com] and on the Canadian Magazines blog [canadianmags.blogspot.com] it really should have been called ‘51 greatest American magazines’. Although not all the magazines listed are produced in the US of A, those that aren’t were tokenary inclusions (Loaded but no i-D? C’mon).

Lists are fun but tricky. A list of ‘Best Ever Magazines’ is doubly so because magazines, by their nature, change from edition to edition, sometimes subtly, sometimes quite dramatically. Take the inclusion of Details [men.style.com/details] for example, a magazine that’s gone from New York-centic hipster guide to edgy Men’s fashion mag to bloke’s best mate to modern girlie mag to it’s current incarnation as metrosexual lifestyle manual. It’s tricky to determine what sort of benchmarks can be used to set certain magazines apart. For a start, there’s so many of the things, though this hasn’t stopped your (sort of) humble author from compiling the Boicozine All Time Top 10 Magazines (a personal selection, mind… subject to change). Here goes… Comments more than welcome…

01 i-D [i-dmagazine.com]
02 Relax [nmca]
03 Harper’s Bazaar (US edition) [bazaar.com]
04 Smash Hits [wikipedia]
05 Self Service [selfservicemagazine.com]
06 Grafik [grafikmagazine.co.uk]
07 The Face [wikipedia]
08 Select [wikipedia]
09 Details [see above]
10 Vogue (Paris & Italia, you can forget the US edition)
[vogue.fr] / [style.it/vogue]

Actually this is really hard… here a few that didn’t quite make the cut but are/were excellent none the less: Sleazenation, Lime Lizard (UK), KGB (USA), RayGun, Frame, The Architectural Review (UK), Games, Mad, Playboy, Interior Architecture (Australia), Sin (Australia), Comet & Challenge (Australia), Spex, V Magazine, Tokion, Lodown… actually there’s loads. Compiling lists can also kind of suck.