Paris Reading List

Having fully blown magazitis means the first thing you have to do when visiting a new city is seek out the city’s finest purveyor of magazines in order to get your fix. I had a few leads in Paris. OFR [ofrpublications.com] has always been a place for mag worship although the quality and regularity of their titles has been somewhat lacking since they decided to focus on vintage clothing. Palais de Tokyo [palaisdetokyo.com] is a great place to visit and has a fab bookstore, they have also started publishing their own magazine which I’ll talk about below. Colette [colette.fr] was pretty darn awesome for mag shopping this time around. I managed to pick up a Japanese version of Tokion, a catalogue of the recent PMKFA [pmkfa.com] exhibition, ‘A Bag of Grease’, as well as a few other gems there too… Here’s a brief run down, ‘mag your way around Paris’ style…

032c [032c.com]
032c comes from one of my fave cities, Berlin, and makes an excellent travelling companion full of fun yet meaty articles for reading inbetween city hopping. With Issue 13, they have taken a new design direction which can only be described as ‘challenging’. Jeremy over at MagCulture discussed it in detail a little while back [magculture.com].

Tokion [tokion.jp]
Relax maybe be long gone now but the Japanese editions of Dazed and Tokion seem to be taking up the slack after it’s departure. Well, to these western eyes anyway. I’ve been itching to see a copy of Tokion since they took the plunge to create a unique version of the Japanese edition and so far it doesn’t disappoint with some snappy typography that enhances the already well established title.

Wallpaper [wallpaper.com]
It’s been all change at a couple of well known British titles this month. The former editor of Wallpaper has moved house to Esquire and given the mag a complete overhaul (it looks great, new size and all, but it wouldn’t have been had to improve upon it’s previous formulaic incarnation). The Editor’s position at Wallpaper has been filled by former creative lead, Tony Chambers. Therefore Wallpaper has a new creative lead and, this issue, a new look. I had to check it out. The new look is worth having a flick through at for sure. Nice choice of type.

Magazine
Wandering about Paris, you think the locals weren’t really bothered about magazines and magazine culture. Sure, there are a handful of decent newsagents (including an ancient-old WH Smiths), specialist mag stores and the newsstands are pretty neat but often few and far between. Then you stumble upon Magazine magazine, a magazine about magazines… natch! It’s a lush publication, which each issue designed by a different ‘cutting edge’ creative team. It’s free too, which is good because it’s also way hard to find. No website and only stocked in a few random stores around town, this mag was like golddust at Colophon2007 earlier this year and for good reason. Read an interview with the editor in the latest edition of Nico [nicomagazine.com].

Technikart / GoGo Paris Guide [gogoparis.com]
GoGo Paris used to be a magazine, then it became a website and then the magazine disappeared, which was a shame because it’s a near indispensable English language guide to all that’s hip to do and see in the capital. French entertainment mag, Technikart [technikart.com] have teamed up with GoGo for a one off guide to Summer in the City. It was like bumping onto an old friend in the street, seeing it back in print again… although they failed to mention that most of Paris shuts down throughout August, we did uncover a number of ace places to go or at least note down for next time.

Palais [palaismagazine.com]
I didn’t get the idea behind Palais magazine when I first saw it but now I’ve been to Palais de Tokyo to see one of the shows it talks about, it all makes sense now. Palais works as a new sort of exhibition catalogue. See the show, buy the mag. It’s kind of ace when you put the two together. It’s also a kind of interesting new avenue for consumer publishing too.

Zero Duex
This is free art mag I picked up at Palais de Tokyo and it’s ace. Everything in it is based around the letter ‘B’ and includes Bee Beards, a co-operative called Bank and their collection of amended press releases, pics of Blown Out windows, Bono singing at Balthus’s funeral and loads more. For an art magazine it’s rather jolly (apart from the funeral bit, obviously).