Magazine mogul Jeremy Leslie shares his bookshelf

With 25 years experience in magazine design, not to mention eight years of covering the extensive subject under the title magCulture, it’s a wonder we haven’t already metaphorically burst into Jeremy Leslie’s house and insisted he share his five favourite examples of printed matter right then and there. Instead, we caught him in the build up to The Modern Magazine 2014, the conference which takes place annually in the midst of London Design Festival to shine a torch on the current state of editorial creativity, as well as new directions for the industry.

Unsurprisingly, Jeremy’s bookshelf is home to some pretty key books about editorial design, experimental narrative and typography as image. And if his top five won’t suffice, get yourself down to the conference on 19 September to hear from the editor of New York magazine, the art director of The Gentlewoman and the founder of Gratuitous Type among others, instead.

Ruari MaClean: Magazine Design

I could easily fill up my selection with books about editorial design but in whittling it down to a single example I chose this. The original book about the subject, it’s very much the template for my books in the way it mixes captioned examples and short essays. Published 45 years ago, it remains a great introduction to editorial design, with plenty of advice that’s valid today even if most of the technological references are now quaint. This is reflected in the production of the book. Most of it is black and white – the only colour chapter is the one about colour – but the magazine pages presented throughout provide an excellent record of the first golden age of the magazine.

William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin: The Third Mind

I went through a Burroughs obsession while a student, more for his ideas about harnessing chance than the end results he produced. This book explains those ideas – the cut-up, fold-in and other techniques for randomising text, sound and film. As ever with Burroughs it veers into paranoia and daft ideas about control but the central theme of collaboration between two people to create a third mind remains compelling.

Douglas Coupland: Microserfs

I try to read everything Coupland writes, and have done since his first book Generation X (I’d have selected that here but my copy has disappeared). All his books are packed with artfully jaded pop culture references and he often tosses throwaway remarks into the mix that turn out to be highly pertinent and ahead of the curve. This was the first highlight post-Generation X, a dystopian view of the then newly-connected world and the serfdom of tech workers behind the silicon valley idealism that has proved to be all too realistic. I’ve just worked with Coupland on his new book Kitten Clone for Visual Editions; it was a pleasure working with such a design-literate writer.

Martin Venezky: It is Beautiful… Then Gone

I first discovered Venezky’s design work through Speak, an independent magazine published in the US between 1995 and 2001. Superficially similar to David Carson’s designs for RayGun, the design of Speak was much gentler and used multi-layered assemblages of found type to bring the content to life rather than challenge it. This book covers Venezky’s work across all areas of graphics and maps his intensive, beautiful approach to typography as image. The work is unlike any other designer I can think of, instantly recognisable and powerful yet calm and respectful of the job in hand.

Chris Ware: Building Stories

Chris Ware has done some lovely individual illustration pieces – his covers for The New Yorker come to mind – but this story presented as a box of parts is something really special. Using his trademark diagrammatic style it reveals a story via a series of printed pieces – booklets, posters, books – without a defined route. The reader has to jump in and experience the tale from various angles and in a random order. The result is extraordinary, with elements of Burroughs’ random approach to narrative providing a more realistic insight into the characters than a more straightforward text would allow. Another reference is David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. It’s a beautiful piece of print too, with multiple formats and binding making it a printed equivalent of Punchdrunk theatre productions, beautifully conceived and executed, every detail considered.