Dave Eggers

What was the original gonna be?

It was a home for rejected stories from other magazines.

If your thing was too long or too short or too weird,

We were the island of misfit writings, you know?

Always about writing?

That was the focus?

Yeah, it was mostly fiction.

Sometimes interviews with, like, strange scientists.

Like, but it was all, just all text.

There was nothing else.

It was black and white, too.

But very, like, a precious, pretty object.

Then we started putting more and more time into the objectness of the book.

Every issue is a different form.

One will be a giant hardcover, one was a lunchbox recently designed by Art Spiegelman.

We'll have issues that are connected by magnets.

We'll try to break the form every time so that

People care about the tactile, the object in your hand, and then the subscribers are surprised each time.

And so if you make it pretty, if you make an unusual object, then all the writing inside might have a chance to survive too.

Whereas if you make a cheap or an ugly book, I think you're doing a disservice to whatever work went into that writer's task.