The Alpine Review: What others are saying about it

The Alpine Review

Now that The Alpine Review has been out for a few weeks, it’s a good time to take a look at some of the feedback I’ve been seeing and hearing.

Besides being featured on Coverjunkie’s list of covers you wanna lick, here are just three links to give you an impression:

 

My friend Peter Rukavina (@ruk on Twitter) very kindly wrote:

As to the magazine itself: wow. My elevator pitch would be “A contemporary take on the Whole Earth Review zeitgeist with the production values of Monocle” (…) I haven’t been this excited about a magazine in a long, long time — perhaps not since I read Louis Rossetto’s pitch for WIRED on The Well back in the early 1990s. What’s different about The Alpine Review, though, is that it seems to be a creation of my tribe — a sort of house journal for those of us lurking at the nexus of hacker/maker culture, systems, ecology, psychogeography. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to a “hey, Pete, here’s a magazine made about exactly the things that are interesting to you right now.”

Thanks, Peter!

 

Magculture gave plenty of constructive input including on layout choices, and finds in closing:

There remains enough in the reading and in the flashes of visual character to make this a really promising debut. At $35 an issue it’s not cheap but you certainly get value from that price – it has the scope of a book. I look forward to the next Springs edition, though I’ve plenty to keep me reading meanwhile.

 

Monocle24’s The Stack gave it quite some praise, too. (You can listen to it here, around 33 minutes in.)

The Stack finds that the Alpine Review communicates these notions primarily – and I’m paraphrasing:

  • The magazine says read me over the course of two weeks. It says important.
  • You know you’re going to be engaged.
  • I’m not sure if I would call it a magazine or a book.

They go on to classify it a bit further, to give you more of an impression of what it feels like – again, paraphrasing for easier reading:

There are those magazines which go on my desk and that I have to deal with that day, and those that I really want to savor, that I want to save that for next weekend when I really got time, like 3 hours, that I want to spend time with. The Alpine Review belongs to that latter category. You feel the power of disconnect, you know you will disconnect totally when you have this magazine/book in your hand.

The Alpine Review

 

They then touch upon one aspect I find particularly fascinating, and it’s echoed by many conversations I’ve been having recently.

It’s the idea that it’s a magazine that you’d want to display and maybe even protect:

I would look at it and keep it and very nice condition and put it on my book case.

It’s something I’ve been hearing a lot, and I can totally relate to it. If something feels pristine, you don’t want to ruin it.

I’d make a case for the opposite notion: That the magazine, like a good pair of jeans, becomes better with use. To quote the good folks over at Hiut Denim:

To those who persevere, there will be a reward. Like a Guinness, it just takes time to reveal its quality. (…) Every crease, every mark, every rip, every splash of paint is put there by you.

I’d say the same thing about a mag like the Alpine Review. It’s choke full of ideas & stories, and like all good things they get even better through sharing. So read the whole tome, or parts of it, lend it, get it full of creases and dog-ears and notes.

In other words, make it your own by using it!

 

(By the way, Monocle gave the magazine two thumbs up.)

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