We don’t often find ourselves at a loss for written words, but we’re not entirely sure where to begin when discussing Inque.
There’s the concept: a print-only literary magazine—“a playground of ideas, stories and opinions”—with no digital counterpart (a wholly blasphemous concept on today’s media landscape) and no advertising (financial heresy!). From the outset, it has a preplanned life cycle: 10 issues in total, one per year until 2030, and then no more (a plan that would make many an investor recoil).
Then there’s Inque’s contributors.
Herewith, a nonexhaustive list of the cross-disciplinary creatives taking part:
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Joyce Carol Oates
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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David Lynch
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Paula Scher
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Werner Herzog
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Ben Lerner
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Samuel L. Jackson
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Peter Mendelsund
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Kate Tempest
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Tom Waits.
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Then there’s this mission:
We love making magazines and hate being told what to include in them and love talking to writers about what they want to write about and hate the cost of distribution and love working with photographers and illustrators and hate having to rely on advertising and love the smell of paper and ink and seeing it all come together and hate having to publish something when it's not totally ready and love the collaboration, the sense of the new and the unfound, unseen and unpublished.
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Then there’s the design of the large-format publication. To wit:
Then there’s all the rest, like how Jonathan Lethem will be writing a new novel over the course of the 10-issue run, or how the magazine will produce original pieces limited to 500 copies by leading artists and photographers, or how it will operate under an editorial board comprised of such names as Wesley Morris, Hanif Kureishi, Sharmaine Lovegrove and Simon Prosser.
Collectively, this is the vision of editor-in-chief Dan Crowe (publisher of Port and book editor at Granta) and art director Matt Willey (Pentagram partner and former art director of The New York Times Magazine). And what a vision.
At a time when we’ve been feeling glum about the future, this has vowed to make it infinitely more interesting. And if it seems as if we’re tripping over ourselves in praise of a publication we have not yet read, it’s because we are.
Back the Kickstarter here.
As the founders detail in their launch video (narrated by Cillian Murphy): “It’s the magazine we’ve always wanted to make, and with your help, we can.”