I was surprised to learn that Lucire might be the only magazine brand being licensed from Aotearoa New Zealand at the moment. Unless the search engines are all equally poor at finding local colleagues doing the same thing.
There are other publishers I know here—I had a great yarn with a Christchurch colleague in May—but there’s no one that I’ve been able to have a one-on-one discussion with about being a magazine licensor here.
It’s not the first time I found myself as the only person in an industry, such as when I first became a professional typeface designer. As a youngster, I thought I would work with Joe Churchward, but he never adapted to computers and by the time I went to visit him at Wang House on Willis Street one December, I discovered I had missed him by a week. He had closed up shop and moved back to Samoa. I persisted with developing typeface designs and font software. By this time, I had already developed font bitmaps for the Commodore 64.
When my fonts began selling, initially through Precision Type, I found myself the only person in the country doing this professionally. Pro Design did a feature that even declared there were no professional typeface designers in the country and claimed, when I asked them, that they never found me in any search engine, when I was in every darned search engine known at the time. After all, Desktop in Australia had found me for its February 1996 font feature, through the newfangled medium of the World Wide Web. (That ultimately led to my becoming their typography columnist for 14 years.) And Publish in the US had found me earlier still and played up the New Zealand connection.
I was told that Joe didn’t like computers—and Joe himself told me that later when he returned to Aotearoa. By default, and certainly not by planning, I wound up being the first digital font designer in the country. I really followed my dreams there.
Magazines have been around for a lot, lot longer than digital type, and New Zealand has had some wonderful world-class mags (Dish, Unlimited, Idealog), so I’m still in a bit of disbelief I’m alone as a publisher and licensor of a magazine brand (and hopefully brands). Hence this blog post. If I’m not, please get in touch. Let’s talk shop.
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