Production Process

Making magazines the old-fashioned way: 
individually printed, hand-collated, hand-bound

Stacks of paper on the bed.  Stacks of paper in the living room.  Stacks of paper in the kitchen.  One to five times a year, year after year.

Each copy of each Sensations Magazine issue passes through my hands, whether the original pages are printed from the LaserWriter in my living room, brought to a local print shop so I can add color to the flip side, brought back to my home to be collated, or brought into the kitchen, where we typically punch and bind each copy. 

Believe it or not, each page of each issue which has text only (no art, no photography) is an original generation off a LaserWriter, not a photocopy.  Now think about some of our issues:  Spring 1997 (200 pages), Fall 1997 (170 pages), 1999 (250 pages), Spring 2005 (100 pages), 2006 (300 pages).  Now it's dawning on you...

This is how every copy of 40 issues of Sensations Magazine have been produced, for 20 years.  The sole exception to this standard process was our award-winning Coney Island issue, which was offset printed at a print shop: in the mid-90s, when many of us had money to burn.

In short, a lot of love - and labor - went into getting that copy into your hands.

In exchange, we simply ask one courtesy from you:  if you don't want your Sensations Magazine anymore (from what we can see, most people hold on to them - a testament to its lasting resonance), please donate it to a local library or reading program, rather than toss it away.

People often ask me, "Wouldn't it be easier to send it off to a print shop?"  The answer is, obviously, yes.

But the print quality would not be the same.  The color might look a little less sharp.  The "tradition" we sustain of publishing in this manner links us to the whole long history of American literary magazines, whether set in type on a printing press in someone's basement, or collated by a group of friends with a toast of wine afterward.  We don't want to lose that.

And neither do you.

(Above) A typical Sensations Magazine collation process, Secaucus, NJ, circa 1997