After college — as in, a few days after college — I wanted to start a magazine. More specifically, a travel magazine that was as much about the design and the photography as anything else, and certainly more about those things than selling ads. I got as far as a logo and some stickers before deciding that I should go work at someone else's magazine before I tried to make my own. Long story short, I did get a job but I never made my quarterly and now the publishing industry is in ruins (though intrepid fighters are still entering the fray; here's a list of my favorites).
In a way, "THE OBSERVER'S GUIDE TO JAPANESE VENDING MACHINES" is an altered (and much delayed) version of my postgrad vision. And I did learn a thing or two along the way. Working at a media company in New York, I got to be a part of countless photoshoots and design discussions even though my title said "staff writer." The team I was on made a 200-ish-page magazine a few times a year and I got to see how that hearty sausage was made at every step.
If you like magazines, living in New York has its perks. Whenever I found myself in Nolita I stopped in at Mulberry Iconic Magazines, a shop that looks like any old bodega but has more printed work inside than some bookstores do. Magazines you've never heard of are on shelves and in stacks, many of them experimental in design, more art than info. Places like this can be dangerous if you're not prepared to become a collector.
I'd describe my indie magazine collection as not-small but somehow my partner and I have come to own even more art books. My favorites served as guides when it came time to make "THE OBSERVER'S GUIDE TO JAPANESE VENDING MACHINES." What info goes on a credits page? What does 80-pound paper feel like? These books gave me the answers. They also revealed bookmaking practices I'd never noticed till I paid proper attention to them. Like how most books have two title pages one after the other — the first is called a half-title or bastard-title (nice) and the reason it's there is to protect the real title page from getting marked up when the stacks of pages are delivered from the printer to the binder.
I also looked at a lot of nature field guides because that was the feel I wanted this book to have. We have a few of them at home but they're newer editions and don't have the same feel as older books do. Luckily there are a lot of great used bookstores around Vermont and I think I went to most of them to pick through the field guides. (If you find yourself on Route 7 north of Middlebury, a stop at Monroe Street Books is highly recommended; it looks like a self-storage office from the outside but the shelves inside are stacked and ceiling-high.)
Inspiration only gets you so far and at some point, you have to put down other people's work and make your own. Making a physical object was a driving force behind this project and to confine the entire design process to computer monitors seemed like a strange way to go about doing things. So after I went through the photos a few times on my computer to decide which ones would be in the book, I went to Staples and printed them all. Then I spread them out all over the living room floor to see how they might all fit together. This made it a pain to get to the bathroom but visualizing a physical book became much easier.
I discovered relationships and motifs that I hadn't realized existed until I saw the project — which used to be an idea, then pixels on a screen — spread out at my feet. Then I brought it all back to the computer to finetune everything some more. A lot more, really, but eventually I had a rough layout and I headed back to Staples. This time I printed page spreads and I taped them up on the dining room wall where I could move things around and get a sense of how things would flow from one page to the next. I left the pages up for a week to let them sink in from the dining room table, where I could consider it all over a plate of tacos or a bowl of muesli. (Muesli might be responsible for some drastic late-stage changes.)
It took more than six months for me to finish the book's design, which is four or five more than I'd guessed it would when I started. From the dining room, I sent the final book to my printer in Montreal. Two hours and one international border away and Google got all 150-plus pages there in a few seconds. If only getting all 1,000 books back down to Vermont was that easy. (Anyone have a cargo van I can borrow?)
You can check out all of the previous issues of Inside the Vending Machine in the archive.
Love hearing the behind the scenes story. Thanks for sharing!
Really enjoying hearing about this process. Can you share the tote bag process as well? I’m genuinely curious to know when and how this came to play by tracking “them” down.