The cult of biannuals

MANILA, Philippines - There is something to be said about holding a glossy magazine in your hands and flipping page after page as opposed to reading one on your tablet. And there is much more to be said about holding a biannual magazine in your hands –– that thick volume of reading material that looks better on your bookcase than in your magazine basket.

When everything is readily available with the click of a mouse or the swipe of your fingertip, it is perhaps human nature to retreat back and look for sources of reading pleasure with substance rather than become overwhelmed by digital newsstands. The pressure to keep up disappears when one reads simply for pleasure.

Some biannual magazines appear best manually set –– softbound and airmailed with graphic carton box. They sit nicely on one’s bookcase rather than stored in the cloud, because unlike monthlies, they have more specialized content that is less catalogue-style and not envisioned to be digitally distributed yet.

While it appears a nifty idea to have 20 kilos of paper in a miniature tablet, there is still merit in keeping the physical one when it comes to excellent writing, photography and niche content.

Holding on to a short-lived Spruce, a biannual on the post-lad mag, and the second offshoot of Wallpaper, niche print shows how idealized images have evolved with more thought, from purely fantastic, charmingly polite to a more sober reality –– a signal of gloom and doom. Either way, here are some differentiated titles that won’t be out of place in a curated bookstore. Some of them come in beautiful packages –– but what’s inside is, of course, much more fascinating.