Tuesday, 9:59am
6 August 2013
A mag for Bob
88 magazine lovers have made this one-off newsprint publication for a good cause – raising money to support mag maven Bob Newman
Last March (2013), art director Bob Newman suffered an appalling accident in a swimming pool.
Eye readers will know Bob as a great magazine maven, whose various pages: Facebook , Twitter and Tumblr pages have been treasure troves for great examples of publication design, from the obscure to the notorious. He wrote ‘Shock tactics’ for Eye 82, a memorable article about altmags (alternative weekly news magazines) in the US.
Bob was in a coma for two weeks, and friends and colleagues around the world rallied round to raise money for his family and for his medical bills, using the fundraising page donationto.com/friendsofbobnewman.
His friend Christine Curry explained on the site that ‘As a freelance consultant, Bob has no salary. So he has no current income, and will have no way of working for many months … Bob’s most recent employer, Reader’s Digest, went bankrupt, suspending his expected severance pay.’
Spread from My Favo(u)rite Magazine
Now there’s another way to help Bob. My Favo(u)rite Magazine, a Anglo-American one-off, is a collaboration between Andrew Losowsky (Stack America, Huffington Post) and MagCulture’s Jeremy Leslie.
It’s a simple concept: 88 writers, most of them art directors like Bob, have each contributed a short piece about their favo(u)rite magazine. Each piece is accompanied by a picture or two, and the whole thing is published on newsprint through The Newspaper Club.
You can order a copy from magculture.com/shop. There are three options available: print edition (£15.99), pdf digital edition (£12.99) or a limited edition package that includes a print edition signed by the editors plus one of the magazines featured in My Favo(u)rite Magazine (only ten available at £59.99). Here are a selection of spreads from My Favo(u)rite Magazine.
Bob himself made a contribution to My Favourite Magazine, a tribute to Ramparts (1970). Bob writes: ‘Ramparts was like no other magazine I had ever seen. It was simple, cool and understated …’
Simon Esterson writes about The Sunday Times Magazine in the 1960s & 70s; André Mora talks about Talk.
Martin Colyer describes his discovery of Linus. Tuoma Jääskeläinen appraises Look.
Luis Mendo on the ‘Mystery’ issue of Wired. Stack’s Steven Watson on Zembla.
Concept / editor: Andrew Losowsky. Creative Director: Jeremy Leslie. Designer: Ling Ko. Price: £15.99. PDF: £12.99; Limited edition: £59.99.
All profits from My Favo(u)rite Magazine go to the fund of Bob Newman’s family.
For more details see the MagCulture blog.
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.