Wallpaper* star Tyler Brûlé may be starting something called Monocle (“a new, global, European-based media brand…delivering the most original coverage in global affairs, business, culture and design”), though at press time monocle.com was not live, but in my mind the real Monocle will be the wittily designed, unusually shaped, and culturally astute humor periodical of the ’50s and ’60s, edited by Victor Navasky, Richard Lingeman, et al. From a workshop in which Navasky participated (when?) at the New School, “On The Nation and the Historical Role of the Journal of Opinion”:

VN: The relevance of Monocle to this discussion today is that it taught me that all of the assumptions in the magazine business in the United States of America are dictated by business interests, rather than political, reader or writer interests.

For example, I made a joke about the fact that we were a “leisurely quarterly,” coming out twice a year — and yet the question remains, why should magazines come out every week, or by moon cycles, or every month, or every quarter? Why shouldn’t they come out when they have something to say? The reason they come out this way in this country — and in other countries there are other reasons — is that you can’t get second class mailing privileges from the United States Post Office unless you come out on a regular schedule, and you have to pay a lot more to mail it if you don’t have second class mailing privileges.

The second theory we had at Monocle was: Why should a magazine cost the same every week? One week we have two dollars and fifty-cents worth to say, and the next week we may have 25 cents’ worth to say. They next week we might have five dollars worth to say. So why don’t we charge what it’s worth, rather than the same price every week? Well, the retailer will get confused. It’s a business decision you make not to charge what it’s worth, as you would with books.

Why should a magazine be in the same shape every week, on the same paper? Monocle was long and thin for much of the time, and we called it “as tall as Time and as wide as Reader’s Digest.” We thought that we could sell ads that way, but we didn’t sell any ads.

Later: I just noticed that Steve Heller has a nice long post about this at Design Observer. Read it!