Nice moment at the FIPP magazine conference yesterday when mercurial publishing legend Felix Dennis, chairman of Dennis Publishing and now of course also owner of book printer Butler, Tanner & Dennis, speaking on the topic of innovating in a downturn, regaled the audience with the tale of launching Maxim magazine in the USA just a few months before the great market crash of 1997.

After the many travails endured while getting the title off the ground, going against much expert advice in the process, Dennis described his most indelible memory as visiting a monster US print plant in the Midwest [I think this would be a Quebecor facility] "watching thousands and thousands of ink-fresh copies thundering towards the binding lines", and being tapped on the shoulder by one of the printers who suggested that the magazine could be even better "if a small section on guns and weapons" were added. On that occasion Dennis declined to take the reader's advice.

The success of the magazine, which started with a print run of 200,000 and at its peak was selling 2.7m copies in the States, resulted in Dennis giving a conservative estimate of the profits generated by the title for the publisher and its affiliates as being in excess of $3bn, no doubt making a substantial contribution to Dennis' own considerable fortune (estimated at £500m in this year's Sunday Times Rich List) in the process.

While the UK print edition of the title is no more, Dennis has made a lot of money out of print, and continues to do so thanks to the success of titles like The Week, cited by two panellists from the advertising world as their "must-read" magazine of choice earlier in the day.