Dan R: OK let’s start with your position at The Happy Reader. What’s your role and what’s the most important part of your job from your perspective?
Seb E: My job is to come up with the overall vision for each issue, secure cover stars, commission writers, edit their work, and then collaborate with the rest of the team to turn all the material we have into a coherent, entertaining and interesting issue. It's hard to say what's most important as it's all important, and all connected somehow.
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DR: How big is the team behind The Happy Reader?
SE: The magazine is a collaboration between Fantastic Man magazine and Penguin Books, and the team is drawn from both. There are thirteen people on the masthead, plus all those who contribute to each issue, but if I think about it the web is much wider than that. There are so many conversations with other people at both organisations that end up having an impact on the way an issue turns out.
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DR: The mag is a fun mix of books and magazines, literature and visuals, lifestyle and reading. Can you tell more about the concept and how it was conceived? What’s the ultimate purpose of the magazine for its readers?
SE: The concept grew out of a conversation between Fantastic Man and Penguin Classics about what would happen if the former applied their method of magazine-making to the latter. So you'd have this very contemporary way of working with print in dialogue with the best books ever written. Fantastic Man's directors Jop van Bennekom and Gert Jonkers came up with the idea for a magazine in two distinct halves. The first features a long, freewheeling conversation with a celebrity or significant cultural figure about the books they love and that have shaped them. The second is a series of articles inspired by a single classic work of literature, which we call the 'Book of the Season'.
It's a book club, presented as a magazine, with all of the free-form asides and tangents that any real book club ends up containing. “When I read Mrs Dalloway it reminded me of this psychological theory I heard about, which...” and so on and so forth. You don't have to read the Book of the Season to enjoy the magazine, but it's fun if you do.
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DR: With a different cover star and literature focus every issue, the magazine covers a lot of ground. Do the two halves of the magazine need to reflect or work nicely with eachother to make the magazine work, or can they exist separately, side by side?
SE: So far we've actually been quite keen for there to be a contrast, for the cover star and book feel quite different to one another. There's a second cover in the exact centre of the magazine which marks a clear transition from the world of the interview to the world of the book. But then you'll see little touches that cross between the two. In the current issue all of the footnotes are headed by graphics resembling plant markers. These are inspired by The Black Tulip, our horticulturally-themed Book of the Season, but they spill over into the interview with Olly Alexander.
DR: You also work at Fantastic Man; how does each role influence or affect the other? Or are they mostly separate “jobs”?
SE: They are separate jobs but each magazine is driven in some way by a sense of curiosity and wonder about people and their inspirations. So I'm sure that lessons learned in The Happy Reader are often completely useful to Fantastic Man, and vice versa. Both are dream projects, really.