A Day In The Life - Jeremy Leslie

This month we asked Jeremy Leslie, the founder of magCulture.

The day starts with a quick catch up with shop manager Bella, who’s been away for a couple of days. On the agenda: our coming 40% rent increase, staff holidays, live events. At 10am I welcome this week’s student group to the shop for a talk and Q&A session. This cohort are from the MA Fashion Journalism course at the London College of Fashion. I talk them through what we do at magCulture, highlighting why printed magazines are still relevant, and share some favourite examples. They’re here to learn about the new generation of magazines, but it’s also a chance for me to hear from them. Groups visit from London, across the UK, Europe and the US, and from across all the obvious disciplines: design, journalism, fashion comms, marketing and photography. We run one every week, and they always bring up great questions—it’s inspiring to meet so many young people who are buzzed about print magazines.

There’s still something exciting about Selfridges—how many department stores can you say that about?—so when they invited us to host a six week pop-up at their London flagship we jumped at it. We wanted our space to be as much a celebration of indie mags as a shopping space, and the Selfridges creative team have been brilliant to collaborate with, even bringing in Vitsoe 606 shelving to make us feel at home. A bonus detail has been seeing the magCulture logo shine out on the store’s LCD screens all around the huge store. It’s been a great opportunity to get the magazines we champion in front of a new audience, and has encouraged us to try new ways to promote ourselves. A part of our set-up at Selfridges is a weekly series of super-sized front cover blow-ups, so we’ve been videoing magazine makers about their cover strategies alongside their enlarged covers. Today was the turn of Whitney Mallett from the Whitney Review of New Writing, who happened to be in town from NYC for a couple of days. I ask the questions, Annelise films the answers. We’ve also talked to people from Fantastic Man, The Fence and MacGuffin. Catch them all on Instagram—the series is titled 'Covered.'

Two stops east along the Elizabeth line and a walk up from Farringdon, and we’re back at our HQ for lunch. The May heatwave has reached its nadir, with temperatures in the thirties baking Clerkenwell. Luckily our shop takes a while to warm up even in the hottest weather, remaining cool thanks to its terrazzo floor and window awning. The terrazzo has become a graphic icon for the shop, we’ve printed the black, white and red pattern on our shipping wrap and other promo items (we recently produced pin badges of the pattern, a true IFYKYK promo item). The awning prevents the sunlight bouncing in off thepavement. We recently collaborated with i-D magazine to brand the front of the awning. We value our relationship with publishers and are always open to collabs like this. The shopfront has been photographed many, many, times but this picture somehow radiates the day’s heat. The window display is the second issue of Elastic, which we recently launched with an event at the shop.

We receive new stock every day, sometimes as many as 50 fresh arrivals, and I’d love to say I spend my time opening boxes and browsing, but I have little time to look at the new stock. I currently have the following apps open on my laptop: iA Writer, Things, Google docs, Photos, Gmail, Spotify (the music in the shop is an essential part of our identity) and Shopify. And my phone’s locked into Instagram. Most of my time is spent churning through these apps, making sure everything’s coming together. We’re one of the few magazine shops that accept magazines for sale direct from publishers as well as from distributors, which doubles the volume of emails and admin. But the magazines are everything, and alongside me, Bella is interrogating the new issue of It’s Freezing in LA!, and writing its Shopify product description. We write all our own copy for the product pages, another central part of our identity. Between Bella and me sits a pile of new submissions, magazines that want to be on our shelves, currently about 25 deep. Who says magazines have no future? Opposite me, project manager Annelise is cutting together the Whitney video, and out front Sandy is helping customers, both IRL and online.

The IRL shop has been a revelation since it opened ten years ago. Turns out people really wanted a public space devoted to magazines. As I said to the LCF students, human beings need real, physical, things in their lives, not just an iPhone full of digital files, and having a physical space to browse and buy magazines fulfils the same desire for the tangible. Our live events are an extension of this: people want to come together and share their passion for print. The extreme heat forced us to postpone this week’s magCulture Meets No Way Back (more admin!) but we have a host of events coming up, and have just announced our first magCulture Fair for Saturday 4 July—Independent’s Day! Over 40 indie publishers will be selling their magazines in what I hope will become an annual showcase of the power of independent print magazines. As the days ends, Neil from Jay’s Displays swings by to install a vinyl on our window, announcing the return of Record Culture magazine after a four-year break. Next task: replace those copies of Elastic in the window!