36 Dollars Magazine

From The Math Club

I always liked to buy larger format art magazines for my coffee table that I never looked at. Big Magazine for example. I realized that I simply bought it for how it looked on the outside, and didn't really fucking care about the content. And at at least $17 a pop, these magazines also bordered excessively expensive. I took this as my premise and designed a magazine around it.

36 Dollars Magazine - ISSN 1544-9629

I researched cost effective printing, bindery post-and-pre-press things and the like. Anyhow, I found this entire sub-universe of paper cutting devices. Beginning at $600 for the lo-tech Martin Yale 7000E all the way to these fully electronic robot things costing as much as a BMW 325. And then, bindery... hot melt, cold glue, perfect, and what-not. Over all, its a very complicated and expensive process doing anything other than printing out a bunch of pages on your works laser printer, folding them in half, and stapling them together. Going from `zine to magazine is effectively adding two zeros to the end of your budget.

I was still not detered though, I hit up craigslist and other random places (ebay) and found myself a set of ghetto garbage equipment, went to home depot, built some ghetto bindery clamps, got some contact sement and the such. I actually have a Bernina 135 sewing machine that I use to do clothing crap, and I remebered from jr. high yearbook that a lot of magazines are stitched in groups called signatures. So I decided that my sewing machine could do this, after all, it was a Bernina! Now I just had to find content. Well that was easy since the premise was that I didnt really give a shit about opening the thing, so I went into my grandfathers garage full of old stuff and found a bunch of old homework from the 60s, misc. old paperwork and parking tickets, military documents, car repair books, blueprints and basically any other quasi-interesting-looking paperstuffs. I just cut pages to format, stitched them together in groups of 6, and binded 5 of these groups together against the cover using my homemade "perfect" binding squaring-clamp, which I designed in photoshop and printed out. I came up with this cool technique for making translucent "alpha-blended" covers. Mineral Oil and an iron to extract the ezxcess oil from the paper, between sheets of newspaper.

Anyhow, I made a bunch of these over the months with varying covers, and sometimes I would distribute a handful that I had not given away at Needles and Pens. I even registered the magazine with the ISSN and Library of Congress, so its an official serial publication. I haven't made a new issue since May 2004, but when I get some time I might make some more, and hey, at least I know how to do this now and it was definately fun!