I struggled home last night under the weight of the bumper December issue of GQ, wondering why there never seems to be a native bearer in sight when you need one.
Magazines for the dapper and style-conscious man about town are not a regular read at Francis Towers, as evidenced by the fact that the man of said household exclaimed "Gah! Poor fella, look at the state of his stomach" when he caught sight of the rippling torso adorning the Calvin Klein ad on the back cover. This explains why I had to go out and buy my own copy.
This epic 20th anniversary edition weighs more than 1.6kg, is the best part of 600 pages in extent, and is stuffed full of ads and inserts. Its dimensions are more akin to a telephone directory of old, or the Littlewoods catalogue. The spine is more than 20mm. It must be trebles all round in the Condé Nast commercial department.
The publisher is of course renowned for attention to detail anyway, but I imagine the planning that went into this issue must have been extra-meticulous. Just thinking about the flatplan makes me feel quite dizzy.
It helps, of course, when you have fantastic content and photography, and Wyndeham Prepress has done a great job on the repro. Nice choice to put Goldenballs himself on the cover, with, appropriately enough, a gold MetalFX effect. Lovely job by St Ives Roche. The text pages are beautifully printed at St Ives Plymouth, and I'm sure Stora Enso will have been delighted by the extra tonnage of NovaPress required for this monster. I had imagined that binding this behemoth would have been a multi-part effort taking weeks and weeks, and was amazed to learn that Plymouth was actually able to do it in one pass on its massive 31-station Muller Martini Corona. Perhaps not quite at top speed... but in one pass. I just picked the whole magazine up by one page - an unreasonable thing to do, I know - but it held.
What's more, the reading pleasure a magazine like this delivers could not possibly be replicated on the internet or on some sort of digital device - just one example being the terrific fold-out section in the centre celebrating 20 years of iconic covers. Turns out that my ultimate boss, Michael Heseltine, was the mag's first cover star - cool! Also interested to see that the masthead hasn't changed in 20 years either, this is pretty unusual in the world of magazines.
Whether this is the biggest consumer magazine ever seen on these isles I don't know - perhaps there's been a bigger Vogue? Record-breaking or not, it's truly something to savour and I will be reading it for weeks. It's a fantastic example of why magazines are far less vulnerable to online substitution than some other print media. At £3.90, it's also a snip and well worth four quid of anyone's money.
It really is a thing of beauty and I hope that everyone involved in its creation is justly proud of the end result. A huge 'rah to you all.
