I love magazines. I should do. I’ve spent most of my adult life writing for them. Increasingly though, magazines are becoming hard to like, let alone love. Grown bloated on d-list celebrities, fad diets, watches, cars, tits, cellulite, empty sound bites and hot air, they’re just another noisy distraction designed to entertain the shortest of attention spans. Of course, you could say that for something more substantial there are always books, and as someone who writes those too I certainly wouldn’t argue with their value. But it’s not the same. Books are about words sparking the imagination; a writer and a reader, alone in a space sharing a thought. Magazines are about words and pictures and how the two interact. They’re about a designer’s interpretation of an attitude, a photographer’s understanding of a subject, a writer’s assessment of the situation and an art director’s idea of how all three can best come alive on the page. Or at least that’s the way I think of them – exciting explosions of ideas, unexpected stories that grab the attention and suck you in.

The truth is that mainstream consumer magazines aren’t like that anymore. And it’s a recent change. In the last 10 years word counts have plummeted, the pictures are bigger (although, sadly, not better) and the imagination, the vocabulary and the subject choice have become so constrained that it’s hard to tell one men’s magazine from the next and all the celeb gossip weeklies from each other. I could blame Loaded or Heat or everyone else who’s helped cheapen the format, but the real point is not to blame others but to do something about it – which is why I’m currently trying to get a cool, quality, pop culture quarterly off the ground. More of that in another post.

Away from the mainstream though, the magazine is very much alive and well and lovable. Independent publishers are doing all the things which used to make me buy magazines by the armful. They’re spilling imagination all over the page, exciting with indescribably sexy images and delivering rock’n'roll in print, and making all of it so exciting you could just reach in and touch it.

I know this because I recently bought two amazing books. We Love Magazines is a celebration of the magazine as an art form, focusing on 10 stunning publications from around the world, as well as reliving the greatest moments in magazine history and providing an extensive directory of the coolest magazines in the world – or most of them, there were a couple missing. My other purchase was the equally incredible follow-up, We Make Magazines : Inside the Independents, a celebration of the people and the passion behind the most influential independent magaiznes in production – as well as a tribute to those great titles long since departed.

Both books are beautifully executed with the same imagination and attitude as the titles they’re examining, so while bloody expensive, they’re worth every penny. It’s enough to make you want to put pen to paper and start dreaming up your very own super cool title… oh, wait a minute…