You may need a bigger coffee table; English-language magazines in Taiwan are starting to stack up. Not long ago, the only places to read what was happening in the worlds of art and music, or decide where to go on the weekend were the Friday listings of a pair of English-language newspapers. Now, thanks in large part to a handful of ambitious foreign residents, local presses are churning out copies of English and bilingual magazines. And best of all, they're free.
The latest free zine to join the paperchase comes from the unlikely location of Tainan. Bunk is the brainchild of a group of friends and residents of the southern Taiwan city who were looking for a creative outlet from teaching English and, it would seem, gathering each week at their favorite watering hole. It joins the likes of That (那個), the bilingual mini-monthly making a splash in Taipei, and Compass, a monthly city guide to leisure activities in Taichung that was founded in 1994. In the past year and a half, Compass' publishers have embarked on two similar ventures; FYI South, a leisure guide for the Kaohsiung area, and Taiwan Fun for the Taipei market. Still another is the cosmetics and couture-driven Taiwan Lifestyle, a trilingual giveaway now in its fourth year of publication.
Bunk's 48-page, four-color first issue is a tribute to the Armory, a bar that in the years since it opened has become popular with locals and an institution among the city's foreign residents. While the magazine is short on goings-on outside the Armory, it does provide readers with a fly-on-wall perspective of all that happens inside. One article titled "Girls who tinkle" tells you more than you'd ever care to know about urinating in the lot adjacent to the pub.
Save for a few snippets of bilingual content, though, Bunk's first edition was English-only -- something the publishers plan to improve on in future issues. "That will definitely be the focus of the next magazine," said Sean Quigley, one of Bunk's founders. "I'm not sure how some of the articles will translate -- the humor can be kind of strange -- but we definitely want to have more locals writing for it, and more stuff translated."
Their first print run of 2,000 copies is devoid of advertising and was paid for by the owner of the Armory, who commissioned it for the bar's fifth anniversary. The group, including Quigley, Marie Bartlett, Neil Gaffney and Gabriel Goldsmith, had such a good time putting it together that they decided to keep going. "You can see that it is very much an amateur publication," Bartlett said. "Our staff has little or no experience in magazine publication and as our experience grows we hope to maintain this feeling of freedom."
For those in the Taipei market, publishing isn't quite as free. That prints 10,000 copies of 68 glossy color pages and distributes them to 70 locations each month. Its tenth issue is due out the first week of February.
"We hope to grow it into 96 pages and of course increase the print run," said Giles Heasman, who started the zine together with his wife, Monique Lee. As the magazine's creative director, Lee gets the credit for a design aesthetic that has caught the attention of several high-profile local magazines such as Elle and Bang, both of which have featured stories on it in their own pages.
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