Here’s what you’ll find in a typical shelter magazine: penthouse apartments and mansions belonging to socialites and celebrities, miles of hardwood floors and acres of stainless steel, bathtubs the size of swimming pools and pools the size of small lakes, antique French garden tools and one-of-a-kind designer kitchen utensils.
    Here’s what you’ll find in Nest: a 40-year-old man who wears diapers and sleeps in a crib, an Indonesian bird that decorates its lair with colored stones and vomit, the final resting place of Napoleon’s penis, cosmonauts and Navy seamen, a barbed-wire-trimmed bed that’s also a tank, and a Gothic Christmas card from weird filmmaker John Waters.
    Nest is not your typical shelter magazine.
    Going into its fourth year of publication, Nest bills itself simply as "A quarterly of interiors." 
    And so it is, but in fact it has become much more than that. 
    It's now regarded as one of the most beautifully crafted and wildly imaginative magazines in existence--and not just by the people featured in it.  
    Last year, Nest received a General Excellence award from the American Society of Magazine Editors. 
    This year, the magazine has been nominated in three categories, including general excellence, design and photography.
    While other shelter magazines work within a narrow definition of a home, Nest’s interiors include any space inhabited by people, or even animals. 
    Among the subjects of recent Nest articles has been the shobo, a type of earth-floored longhouse inhabited by the Matis tribe of the Brazilian Amazon.
    A story on Project Greek Island tells of a giant bunker built under a mountain in West Virginia for use by members of Congress in the event of a nuclear war.
   Then we have, with text and ample pictures, stories on a Texas house constructed from thousands of beer cans; the recently de-orbited Russian space station Mir; and the USS Louisiana, a nuclear missile submarine. (The last article was written by "Fight Club" author Chuck Palahniuk.)
    Editor in chief Joseph Holtzman founded Nest in 1998 and continues to publish it out of a studio apartment on Manhattan’s upper East Side adjacent to his own one-bedroom apartment.
    A designer and former college teacher, Holtzman had no experience in publishing when he decided to start a magazine of his own.
    "In a way, the whole project has been perpetuated by stupidity and ignorance," he says. "At first I went to experts who told me it would fail. They wanted me to pay them $30,000 to do it right."
     Among the consultants’ criticisms: the failure to identify a target audience.
     "They asked me, ‘Who is your reader?’ I said, ‘Anyone who reads this.’ They said, ‘That’s not how it works.’"
     But Holtzman didn’t allow himself to be dissuaded.
     "I walked out of the office. I thought, why would I listen to them? It was an ugly office and they had bad suits." 
     Instead, he poured what money he had into the first issue of Nest.
     In shaping the magazine, Holtzman drew on his experience creating interiors, approaching the magazine as a physical space or object rather than as mere pages.
     With no formal training in magazine design, his designs were unfettered by traditional limitations.
    One issue of Nest was printed entirely on paper that had been die-cut into a trapezoid; another came in a zippered multi-color transparent plastic jacket.
    Still another featured nude models wearing scratch-off bathing suits on the front and back covers.
     Holtzman, who lays out each page of the magazine himself, says such innovations are as much for his own diversion as for the reader’s.
    "Just to keep from being bored, I do something," he says.
    He also amuses himself weaving one or more themes into each issue, themes which can be as simple as "plaids" or "peacocks" or as conceptual as "the instinct to decorate." Holtzman says he doesn’t select the themes, which often bear no obvious relation to one another.
    Rather, he says, themes emerge organically over the three months it takes to put together an issue.
    For Nest No. 11, the principal theme of which was crosses, Holtzman had the printers use a laser to burn a cross-shaped hole through each copy from front to back.
    In addition to integrating the singed holes into the design of each editorial page, Holtzman did his best to do the same with the advertising pages. For instance, in an ad for the Museum of Modern Art, the cross provides the hole in a letter "o." 
    Holtzman cites this as an example of how he creates extra value for advertisers. But he concedes that not every advertiser is thrilled to have a hole seared through the middle of an ad.
    Nest’s current circulation is 75,000. The magazine’s newsstand sell-through is, of necessity, extremely high, says Holtzman, noting that between production and distribution costs, each copy of Nest that sells on the newsstand for $12.50 costs him $15.50. 
    For that reason, Nest has embarked on its first-ever subscription drive, sending out 250,000 booklets to what Holtzman calls a "carefully targeted group."
    But no matter how big its circulation gets, Holtzman says Nest will stick to its quarterly publishing schedule. He worries that a higher frequency would dilute the individuality of each issue.
    "I don’t want to become formulaic," he says. "We’re not going to do ‘Nest Goes to Spain.’"

April 23, 2001 © 2001 Media Life

- Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.

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