Thursday, February 19, 2009

Calgary's UPPERCASE Gallery to launch quarterly magazine

A new, quarterly magazine is being launched this spring in Calgary that will celebrate graphic design, typography and, among other things, "great ideas and strange inventions".

It's called UPPERCASE, a magazine for the creative and curious and it's published by UPPERCASE gallery owner Janine Vangool, collaborating with writer, curator and teacher Deidre Martin.

UPPERCASE Gallery opened in February 2005, specializing in "making, curating and publishing visual culture" and has branched out into publishing the magazine and specialty books, marketing them through its online store and on-site shop.
This magazine is a labour of love, and our hope is to make it a sustainable endeavor. The magazine will not be available on newsstands, but via UPPERCASE and a small network of like-minded shops and booksellers. Your subscription is a vote of confidence, a pat on the back and a high-five rolled into one. Our goal is to gather a few hundred loyal subscribers over the next couple months and to continue to grow our readership slowly and steadily over the next year.
The first issue, which will be released the first Thursday in April, is to be 68 pages in full colour, standard 8.75" x 11" and perfect bound. It undertakes to carry no more than 6 pages of advertising. A local subscription will be $60, mailed to Canadian addresses $72, U.S. subs $80. (The cover illustration is by Madrid artist Blanca Gómez.)

They have a decidedly non-traditional circulation model:
UPPERCASE is thinking small in order to think big. We don't need to be in newsstands everywhere, we just need to be accessible to the people who want us. Traditional magazine distribution encourages overproduction, resulting in wasted resources and pulped magazines.

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3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Pretty cover!

1:52 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I am all for new circulations models and this publications will undoubtably be beautiful. But I went to subscribe on the site and balked at the 72$ price tag. Sadly, too rich for my blood.

6:48 pm  
Blogger D. B. Scott said...

Had we not spent generations, devaluing our magazines and convincing ourselves that they could be bought for $2 a copy or less, this might not seem so out of reach. When you think of it, $72 works out to $18 a copy, considerably less than most trade paperback books cost now. I hope they get a select few outlets in eastern Canada where we can buy them as single copies. We might think then that a $72 sub was worth the price.

10:09 pm  

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