The long way round: a guide to independent travel magazines

Travel writing has a credibility problem, and most of it plays out in magazines. The form was colonised long ago by the service piece — ten hotels, five beaches, a numbered list assembled on a press trip — and readers have learned to discount it on sight. The independent titles work on a different premise. They treat a place as a subject rather than a destination, which makes them slower, more argumentative and considerably better company. Four independent travel magazines are on the shelf at Boutique Galleria at the moment, and between them they cover most of what the category is capable of.

Why the independent version reads differently

The economics explain a good deal of it. A mainstream travel magazine sells pages to tourist boards, hotel groups and airlines, and the editorial arranges itself accordingly. Independent publishing has no such obligation, which is why these titles can spend eight pages on a road in Patagonia that nobody is trying to sell you.

Frequency matters just as much. Most of these magazines are biannual or quarterly rather than monthly, so nothing is written to a seasonal deadline and nothing goes out of date in six weeks. The photography is commissioned rather than supplied. The writing is long enough to change its mind halfway through. The result sits closer to a book than to a brochure, which is the reason luxury magazines and books tend to end up on the same shelf in the same houses.

The Travel Almanac: travel as a cultural conversation

The Travel Almanac is the most ambitious of the four, and the least interested in itineraries. Issue 28 is a biannual hardcover running eight covers — Dries Van Noten, Julie Mehretu, Kid Cudi, Louisa Jacobson, Charlie Jones, Awar Odhiang and Jacqui Hooper among them — and its method is to put travel writing next to fashion, portraiture and long-form conversation until the categories stop being separable.

What it understands is that people who move for a living think about place differently from people who arrive for a week. A choreographer, a painter and a designer each have a working relationship with distance, and the magazine gets them to describe it. UK cover price £25.

Holiday: the city, room by room

Issue 396 of Holiday — The Samarkand — continues the title's habit of mapping global culture city by city. The distinguishing feature is that it pairs aspirational interiors with the practical access most travel magazines leave out: where the thing actually is, and whether you can get into it.

It is biannual, properly photographed, and the closest any of these titles comes to a conventional travel magazine while remaining entirely unconventional in execution. UK cover price £30.

Orienteer and Anthology: two other ways to do it

Orienteer takes the visual route. Issue 10 — Dogma — moves through glaciers, mountain trails and roadside rituals, holding photography, essays and poetry against the tension between how a landscape appears and what it actually is: a skier frozen mid-air, a runner deep in repetition, a view turned into a symbol. Its five covers are named after the pictures rather than the people on them — Irregularity in Uniform, The Dharma Bums, Risk Index, As The Crow Flies, System of Movement — which tells you where the editorial weight sits. Quarterly, £24.

Anthology goes the other way and puts the writing first. Volume 25 gathers the winning entries from its annual Creative Awards alongside travel and culture features: a Johann Strauss II walking tour of Vienna, Tokyo's Azabu-Juban, Salzburg approached through chocolate and coffee, and Padua — plus Frida Kahlo at Tate Modern and Schiaparelli at the V&A. It is the least expensive title here by some margin and the one most likely to be read cover to cover. Semi-annual, £12.

On frequency, and where to start

A biannual magazine is well suited to a standing order, because a year of it is two issues rather than twelve, and the arrival is an event rather than a pile. Magazine subscriptions are available on The Travel Almanac, Holiday and Anthology for UK, EU, US and rest-of-world addresses; Orienteer is bought issue by issue.

If you are starting from nothing, Anthology is the gentlest entry and The Travel Almanac the most rewarding. The wider selection sits in Travel Magazines, where the rest of what we stock in the category lives.