Reinventing nostalgia with Buffalo Zine, a jewel of slow-paced publishing

To say the line between a book and a magazine has become exceedingly blurred is really to say the entire pace of print publishing has slowed itself right down. This isn’t news. First, you heard print was dead as title after title vanished from the newsstands. Then you saw it was reborn as quarterly after quarterly and biannual after biannual rose from the ashes and celebrated their printed and bound format. By now people are familiar, if not perhaps weary of hearing how online publishing has transformed the magazine today. Print is a space which now inherently seeks to separate itself from the fickle frenzy of online publishing through careful editing. The magazine has taken on a life that more and more resembles the book, but perhaps most tellingly, even the historically scrappy, rough-edged zine has scrubbed up and grown up into something worlds away from photocopied pages held together with staples.

Enter Buffalo Zine, the first issue of which took friends David Uzquiza and Adrián González-Cohen three and a half years to put together. Inspired after a summer spent in Berlin in 2007, Adrián enlisted David to help him put together a small fanzine for their friends. Fast-forward to 2011 and Buffalo Zine was finally born with a one-way ticket to near cult status. The second and third issues, which wiped the slate clean and were designed from scratch, were worth their respective two-year waits, with the latter arriving this summer in a finely-tuned blaze of nostalgia and vintage-inspired glory.

“We approach each issue like it’s the first one,” says David, explaining their process. “And we have a tendency to get very deep into each one; we always end up hoarding a massive amount of material. It’s like filling a room with hundreds of objects and furnishings, and then it takes us a long time to sort it all out, dust it off, edit, mix, ungroup, regroup, tidy up, polish and finally arrive at a harmonious arrangement.”

Cloth-bound, hardcover with a glossy dust jacket and weighing in at almost 2kg, issue three is DIY like you’ve never seen it. The struggle, David explains, is in “aiming to make Vanity Fair with the budget of a high school fanzine.” And yet the publication’s most mature incarnation yet does away with the teenage focus of previous issues and looks back to childhood. Heavy on 70s kitsch, it marries references from old interiors magazines, favourite children’s books and the styles of eccentric old ladies to beautiful effect.

“I think this issue of Buffalo is less about what’s on the surface, and more about who we are deep down,” Adrián writes in his editor’s letter. “We didn’t want to talk about trends,” he tells me. Strangely timely and timeless all at once, old meets new on the pages of Buffalo, which looks at youth culture with fresh eyes, mixing and matching a storybook aesthetic and eclectic typography with a tongue-in-cheek sensibility. The issue also delves into the archives of designers including Vivienne Westwood and J.W. Anderson, as well as counting Tim Walker, Harley Weir, Kate Bush and Chloe Sevigny as contributors.

“When we started, we really were missing something,” Adrián goes on. “Magazines were amazing and suddenly, more or less after Carine Roitfeld left Vogue Paris, I remember there was this moment when all magazines seemed super boring and looked the same. Long story short, everything looked boring to us, so especially with Buffalo’s second issue we made the kind of magazine we couldn’t find on the shelves. After that, we didn’t want to repeat the same style and typography and layout. Thats why every issue is a first issue; we all want to be surprised when we go to the newsstand to buy a magazine, especially if you haven’t seen it for two years.”