Whoa. Now there’s something we haven’t shared yet. It’s mega. And now feels a good time. We have a brand new set of books coming out this year. A set, originated by contemporary thinker Alain de Botton. A new set of books that live under the umbrella name Writers in Residence.

The big idea behind Writers in Residence is this: each book marries together literary giants (like Geoff Dyer and Douglas Coupland) with world class Magnum photographers and together they go to otherwise very closed, very big places. It’s all about peaking behind doors and looking in. Seeing somewhere like the United Nations or the IMF in a way that it’s never been seen before.

Non-fiction, yes, but not purely. Long form writing but not reportage. Photographic documentation but not in a linear way. Current, yes, but also timeless.

We’re playing with the idea of magazines looking and feeling a lot more like books (think: The Gentlewoman or Monocle), and maybe even, books learning from magazines. And we thought who better to design each Writers in Residence title, looking at ways to collapse book and magazine boundaries than Mr. Magazine himself, the almighty Jeremy Leslie of magCulture.

Before we tell or show you anymore, we thought we’d share a sneak into Jeremy’s world with you, all in keeping with the set’s ambition of looking in and going behind the scenes.

We’ll be sure to show more over the next few weeks. For now, we’ll leave you with this, as Alain said to us in one of our early conversations, “there are many places in the modern world that we do not understand because we cannot get inside them”. Soon we’ll come pretty close.

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