A Brief Appreciation of the Ingenious Design of McSweeney's 28th Issue

The latest issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern -- a magazine which began as a forum for short stories rejected by other publications but which quickly morphed into an oddly-swaggered beast devoted to playful surrealism, humanist storytelling and ingenuous presentation in about equal measure -- arrived at my doorstep earlier this week, and on a pure objet d'art-level, it's a stunner.

Though the content of any given McSweeney's issue can be hit-and-miss -- and sometimes far more "miss" than "hit" -- the design of the issues are roundly beyond reproach: inventive and sumptuous in equal measure. There was the issue on comics that featured a wrap-around dust jacket which folded out to become its own newsprint comics-section; the mail issue, which arrived as a bundle of letters, ads, and other postal-related ephemera; and then there was McSweeney's #16, inexplicably featuring an official McSweeney's comb. But even for a publication with such an extensive history of unique presentations, the latest volume outdoes itself.

McSweeney's #28 focuses on the "resurrection and reinvention of the fable," and as such features eight separate hardcover books, each containing one fable apiece and a handful of accompanying illustrations.


But it's the presentation of the books that really impresses. Packed in an oversize 11" x 9" flat box, a quartet of books are arranged on the upper level, their backs forming an image of a boy crouching down on a grassy field, listening intently to the earth below:


Remove those books, and beneath you find another layer, both metaphorically and literally:


Lay all eight books out with one image atop the other, and it creates an extended tableau:


The fables themselves are mostly light with a slight edge -- stories of selfish children and rebellious communities and lies that do not exactly eat the soul, but which don't sound particularly healthy for it, either. Here again the design elements are employed to great effect, with each volume being illustrated by a different artist.

Virgil Walker, Arthur Bradford's charming tale of an unexpected octopus baby and his fight for freedom, is accompanied by the drawings of Jon Adams:


Easily my favorite fable of the bunch is Brian Evenson's The Book and the Girl. It starts off a quaint story of a girl and her favorite book, but soon develops a dark current of melancholy and dread when an unspecified apocalyptic event befalls the world, hauntingly rendered by Phillip Fivel Nessen's images:


Evenson's story -- which probably wouldn't run longer than a page when typed out -- struck enough of a chord with me in its closing moments that I went ahead and ordered a copy of his short story collection, The Wavering Knife.

A beautiful design and a writer whose work I'm eager to explore; there's really not much more I can ask from a magazine.

LINKS:
McSweeney's Internet Tendency
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern Issue 28