P - O - L

Gardening for a Living (G.F.A.L.) is a an independent magazine about magic as well as an attempt to do something completely different to the existing publications in the field; the contents, on one hand, reject the so common “instruction manual” model, where one learns how to perform this or that technique, and get closer to the boundaries of magic—understood as a scenic art—, exploring other fields like cinema, dance, narration, literature, illumination…
On the other hand, its design defines the magazine’s own style, clearly different to the existing trends, where we can find things ranging from the extremely amateur look of the consulting books to the ornamented and tattoo-like style of the american magicians.

The name Gardening for a Living comes from an attempt to create a “camouflage” for the magazine—we have to remember magicians don’t want their secrets to be revealed—. At the beginning I proposed a system through wich, when shuffling pages, one would only see pages of a gardening magazine. This system was really easy to create but needed a lot of work in designing the fake pages and a lot of money in printing them;
At the end, the only element created for the sake of magic secrecy was a dust cover that works as a fake cover, where we can see the contents of a gardening magazine. I got so much into the joke I wanted to keep the name of the fake magazine (Gardening for a Living) for the real one (G.F.A.L.) instead of using a common name.

Since the magazine has very few or no pictures at all, I made a double index page where one could see, on the one hand, the contents in image form (the images don’t really match the content; they were found by typing the name of each article on Google Images and choosing randomly) and in text form.

The first article of the magazine is a manifesto of its rules and principles. They were printed on small pages and then photocopied just as if they were a pile of papers.

Picture stolen from Dexter Sinister’s web archive.

In the middle of the magazine there’s a small booklet called The Apprentice, that would run separately from the magazine. Each issue shows, just as the common magazine do, how to perform a specific trick. This issue shows how to perform sauter la coupe.

The last article of the magazine is an essay about the procedures used by the Oulipo group (again). This part of the magazine was designed in a much more free way, translating some of their principles to the page design. These can be seen in a text that sontains itself over and over and in a page that needs to be folded in order to be read.