Beck Is the Dreamer

Children’s magazines tend to fall into one of three categories, and all three are bad. First: pure commercial machinery pushing trading cards and digital purchases at small brains under the guise of entertainment. Second: pseudo-educational projects that smuggle in ideology through the back door of information. Third, and worst: media that’s ostensibly for children but actually targets their parents—parenting guides dressed as kids’ content, in which the child is incidental and the real customer is parental anxiety.

None of these is actually for children. Which makes Papier Mache, an Australian magazine now on its second issue, genuinely surprising. The writing is light and doesn’t talk down. The photography is actually good—not charmingly amateurish, properly good. The subjects are chosen with the kind of cheerful arbitrariness that children’s curiosity actually runs on: fashion spreads that don’t look like ads, craft projects, small quiet dreams. It reads like it was made by people who remember what liking things felt like and haven’t found that embarrassing yet.

Behind it is a Sydney art and design blog called The Convenience Store—Beck, Alice, and Paul, who describe themselves with something like: "Paul does the graphic stuff, Alice does the art stuff, and Beck is the dreamer." Which tells you exactly what kind of operation this is. Not a media venture with a market thesis. Three people making something they wanted to exist.

Magazines like this survive in specific pockets—the kind of household in whatever city’s gentrified quarter where the parents grew up with good design and passed it on without making a project of it. Whether Papier Mache finds enough of those households to keep going, I have no idea. The magazine itself earns whatever audience it gets.