One Week Left to Pre-order Issue Four


Just got this photo from the printer… Issue Four is hot off the presses! Today they’re loaded in cartons and will begin making their way from Wisconsin to our storage facility in Maine. We’ve arranged for them to arrive next week several days before the big packing party on Friday the 23rd and Saturday the 24th where we (with a handful of readers’ help) will wrap them in brown paper, affix the wax-sealed trade cards, and mail them out.

Because we’re shipping these out next week, you only have one week left to pre-order. To get a wrapped copy of Issue Four, you can purchase a yearly subscription or order Issue Four individually. After next Wednesday, March 21st, the pre-order window will be closed. This means that any order after the 21st will be mailed without the special wrapping and trade card.

Print is Not Dead

It goes without saying that we are excited about seeing this thing in our hands but this time around I am particularly interested to see how the significant upgrade in paper works out. For this issue, we’re trying Finch Opaque 70# uncoated instead of the standard 70# uncoated paper we were using. I am hoping for increased clarity and depth in the images so we’ll see how much it gains us.

In this day and age of digital tech, it feels so old-fashioned to have to wait until the tangible product arrives but, in our minds, this magazine doesn’t exist in any other form. There is no digital version that you can instantly download and save to your iPad. Even though we design this thing at a computer screen, until the ink hits the paper and each individual copy is bound and trimmed, the magazine is only an idea – the printed book is the real thing. The way the ink interacts with the fibers of the paper, the way the crisp binding springs the heavy uncoated pages forward, the rich smell of a quality book, all of that is an essential part of what Mortise & Tenon Magazine is. 

The studies are unambiguous: print is better than digital. Hands down. Particularly when it comes to retention, stimulation, and internalization, the printed word (i.e. a real book) proves to be the stalwart format. There is something about the tangibility of the experience that affects readers in a totally different way. Some studies suggest that having multiple senses engaged while reading – feeling the texture of the paper, hearing the turning of the page, seeing a notable word or phrase in a particular physical location on the page – go a long way to internalizing what we read.

We could just export each issue as a PDF and email you your copy of Issue Four. You’d open it and skim. You might pick it back up later when someone reminds you of its existence. You might make it through one whole article but then (likely because screens are terrible to read from), it would get lost in your hard drive forever. You’d nibble and taste but never get at the marrow of this magazine.

This magazine is all about marrow. Mike, Jim, Megan, and I pour ourselves into the editing and production of each issue because we want it to be a source of lasting growth and inspiration to you. We bother with the inconveniences (and expense) of glorious print because we want this stuff to sink in deep. We expect you to highlight, annotate, and dog-ear each issue. We want you to engage.

You can subscribe or order Issue Four here

-Joshua

 


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