Edward Behr's opening letter from issue 83 of The Art of Eating:
As the age of ink on paper slides relentlessly into the electronic one, I think more and more about the nature of a magazine, what sets it apart from any other form of publishing. For me, a magazine is especially about turning pages, about the variety, not knowing what the next two pages will bring; in certain magazines its about the interplay between editorial content and expensively produced ads (the latter often visually much more clever than the former). In a magazine without ads, the challenge is to capture the same excitement.
Edited- I actually meant to post this in the relevant thread,
The nature of a magazine was especially on my mind after the sudden death in October of Gourmet, with its circulation of 980,000, more than 100 times that of AoE. Maybe it tried to be too many things to too many people. A magazine with a more narrowly defined audience is supposed to be in a better position. And happily, because we have no ads, a drastic decline in ad pages cant do us in. But what, everyone wonders, will pay for high-quality information in the media of the future?
Each issue of a magazine should be a performance, complete, not changing but fixed, a quality automatically supplied by ink on paper. We had been planning to offer digital subscriptions, essentially the print magazine in PDF form, and we may do that. But at the same time that life has been growing more digital, Brooklyn hipsters wear full beards and flannel shirts; a few people in Brooklyn, as in, for instance, Paris, keep bees (illegally in the first case), and in a number of US cities they raise chickens. And there is a burgeoning back-to-the-land movement of a new sort, represented by groups such as the Greenhorns. Across the river from Brooklyn in Manhattan, ardent food craftsmen (including some well-tattooed Brooklynites) appear at the marvelous, periodic New Amsterdam Market. We at AoE start to think that maybe the smartest thing we can do is to forget digital, embrace print, and remain solely a well-crafted object.
In this issue, as ever, we struggled with limited time and resources to make a balanced whole. Perfectly balanced content is always the goal, and I dont know whether we will ever achieve it.
But theres one fine element of balance in this issue. While we dont do a lot of how-to, James MacGuire provides both appreciation for sourdough, or pain au levain, as he prefers to call it, and he tells you how to make it. His recipe, despite both our efforts at simplification, risks putting off the casual cook. His aim, as it was in his recipe for a baguette-inspired loaf, is to go well beyond the usual and show you how to control flavor and texture and produce the best possible bread.
Edward Behr, November 2009
