Stack: January

One of my Christmas presents was a subscription to Stack.

Basically, you subscribe and every month they send you a different independent magazine. You don't know in advance what they're sending: it's a surprise. I've decided to review the magazines I receive from Stack over the course of 2014.

In January's delivery there were actually two A3-sized magazines: the Jashanmal Quarterly and Victory.

Jashanmal Quarterly

This is the in-house magazine of Dubai bookshop chain, Jashanmal Books. This issue is all about the renaissance in magazine publishing, meaning that I have received an independent magazine about how great independent magazines are.

The issue presents a series of interviews with people working in different areas of the magazine business, (editors, designers, retailers, distributors, etc.), asking their thoughts on the current state of magazine publishing. I found the design off-putting – why would you put giant, coloured letters over the text I'm trying to read? – and there are some grating spelling mistakes, but overall the content is interesting and I came away with a list of magazines that I'd like to check out, (if the in-house magazine of a bookshop is making its readers want to buy things they wouldn't otherwise think to pick up then it's definitely doing its job). What I would have liked to know is how successful some of the businesses mentioned are. A renaissance in print sounds great, but is anybody actually buying the products? A couple of the interviewees mention money, but it's not really a focus of the interviews as a whole.

Would I buy it again? Yes, I probably would. I understand that each issue will focus on a different area of print publishing, for example, the first issue was about comic books and I'd love to get hold of that one.

Victory

Victory is a good example of how content overrides other considerations for any kind of media. I like Victory's design much more than Jashanmal Quarterly's – it's cleaner and more conservative, with beautiful photography and illustrations facing its text instead of overlapping it – and it seems to be better edited. However, I'd much rather have another Jashanmal Quarterly. I got about halfway through reading Victory, put it down and didn't pick it up again because its content fundamentally doesn't interest me. Stack describes it as “dedicated to the power and glory of sporting endeavour”, which is accurate. It's pretty much manly men doing manly things in an arty way – think Hemingway on bullfighting. If this is your thing you should absolutely be reading it.

Would I buy it again? No, but only because discourses on sports and masculinity aren't my thing.