Last December, 77-year-old Richard Phillips was lying in bed when his collection of 7,000 yachting magazines came crashing through the ceiling and trapped him for several hours. Happily he was rescued but perhaps the most remarkable part of the story was the revelation that Richard had never been yachting. It wasn’t yachting that he loved, it was the magazines.

Helenor Gilmour, Chairman of the Professional Publishers Association, used this quirky tale to launch the first ever Edinburgh International Magazine Festival – a thrilling celebration of innovation and creativity in magazines worldwide.

The centrepiece of the two-day Festival, at Edinburgh’s Dynamic Earth, was ‘The Rise of Print’ an exhibition of 40 independent magazines (including Hot Rum Cow) curated by Jeremy Leslie (pictured above), Creative Director of magCulture. Jeremy cited the collection as evidence that, despite the doom-mongers, we are now living in the true “golden age” of magazine publishing.

Our Creative Director, Eric Campbell, led a design workshop on the first day of the festival, and many of the rest of the Hot Rum Cow team attended yesterday to see speakers ranging from John Bird, founder of the Big Issue, to Andrew Losowsky of the Huffington Post and Danny Miller of The Church Of London.

It was an exciting and inspiring day of big ideas for people with a passion for magazines – here are just 10 of the notes we scribbled in our notebooks:

1. To succeed in magazines you need a burning belief in a great idea.
– Christopher Ward, Redwood

2. Publishing is a business for entrepreneurs and only the most innovative will survive.
– Danny Miller, The Church of London

3. When we create things, like an Instagram picture or a Facebook post, it helps us to process what we’re going through. It makes sense of our experiences and makes them memorable. If we can take that impulse and curate it we can create great magazines.
– Andrew Losowsky, The Huffington Post

4. It’s critical that we never lose that sense of playfulness that you find in magazine publishing at its best.
– Barry McIlheney, Professional Publishers Association

5. People working in charity are very kind, very caring, very thoughtful and very boring. We need some arseholes who will get things done.
– John Bird, The Big Issue

6. Books and magazines will converge to create something new.
– Andrew Losowsky, The Huffington Post

7. We create content in a platform-neutral way. We create the content and then we decide which platform it is best suited to.
– Danny Miller, The Church of London

8. We didn’t have any money. We would choose a £20 stock shot and then write an article to fit it. That was the way it had to be done – but it worked.
– Matt Phare, Shortlist Media

9. In the future, instead of subscribing to magazines, I can imagine people subscribing to a person’s feed of the magazine articles they are reading.
– Andrew Losowsky, The Huffington Post

10. I would argue that we are currently in the golden age of magazine publishing, and I present these 40 magazines as the evidence.
– Jeremy Leslie, magCulture

www.magfest.co.uk