Best Seller 2020: Here are the independent magazines you loved the most

If I had to write the editorial in the last issue of a magazine of the year, I admit that it would be a lot of effort. Summing up and making a list of good intentions are activities that, I believe, cannot be relegated to a specific month and day, but must be renewed daily, because daily is the commitment we put into what we do.

However, there is one thing I love to do at the end of the year, which is then my summing up, putting a period (semicolon) and going to the end: drawing up thein the ranking of Frab's Best Sellers, Write in black and white what you loved most of our catalog which has now reached 700 titles, between old glories and new loves.
I love doing this ranking because it gives me the same emotions that you feel when browsing through a scrapbook. Each magazine, each page is anchored to a precise moment of the year, to a precise enthusiasm in seeing it and leafing through it for the first time and, sometimes, even to a precise disappointment, because we would be hypocrites to tell you that we liked every magazine we read. . 

But let's get to us and our ranking.
For the record, I immediately start by saying that in the first place there would not be a magazine, but a book, to be precise the Flow Book For Paper Lovers that you have bought in the hundreds, but which, not being a magazine, we have decided to keep out of the chart.
The same goes for the Calligraphy Handbook and for ours Urbarium which, with great satisfaction, is in the top five of the ranking, despite a travel notebook in a year when travel is forbidden, it might seem like a crazy idea to most.

Before leaving you in the Top Ten, let me make another premise which is my bet for 2021. In this ranking you will not find K, the new literary magazine de Linkiesta, but I'm sure it's not there just because K is currently in reprint and we weren't able to buy a third supply (you sold out the first two in 48 hours), which will arrive in 2021.

But now let's let the data do the talking. Here are the 10 best sellers of Frab's, a small and dutiful acknowledgment to those who commit themselves every day to creating publications of the highest quality.

10) Menelique n.2

We liked it since number zero because we have a weakness for those who take positions, those who commit themselves, those who take sides, someone would say. And Menelique is exactly this: a committed magazine that in each issue dissects a single topic to make us look at it from multiple points of view, but above all to help us reflect because only by setting synapses in motion can we truly aspire to change.
Menelique was also our November Secret Mag Club. A well deserved tenth place. 

 

9) Weekend Journal London

 

 

8) Sindroms Pink Issue

When I think of something beautiful in an objective way, I think of Sindroms. It will be because it comes from Copenhagen, it will be because its editorial staff, directed by the illustrator and designer Miruna Sorescu, is all female, it will be because I love to look at the world in chromatic order, but this incredible magazine has the power to relax eyes and mind and to at the same time let us discover small wonders, guided by a single color. With its perfect aesthetics and its never predictable content, Sindroms impressed you too and we really had no doubts. 

 

7) The Bloody Mary

It was a bit of the revelation of the year and we have loved it ever since the sample copy arrived at home. Fresh and non-trivial graphics accompany a content that is not enough to define emotional. Its pages, overflowing with art and culture, have made us relive the swing of sensations experienced during the lockdown. Jesi Moliterno and Uliana Sgura, the founders of this magazine, will give us great satisfaction and we are cheering them on.

 

6) Cabana 

 

You don't need to spend many words for this hypnotic, curated, luxurious and snobbish interior magazine, capable of keeping you glued to its pages, daydreaming, for hours and hours.

 

 
 

5) Eye # 100

In the middle of the table we find a real institution in the world of graphics. Eye magazine has blown out its hundredth candle and in its anniversary issue has given us a real historical excursus on the world of graphic design, a look at the past that lays the foundations for the future of this discipline.

 

 
 

4) How much n.2

The second issue of Quanto magazine touches the podium. Giovanni Cavalleri and Zeno Toppan have once again managed to create a magazine that does not go unnoticed and that, to be honest, it is also a bit difficult to call it that. In a single long story, accompanied by original illustrations, among its yellow pages we go to the discovery of the mystical and spiritual Bintù tribe, thanks to the reworking of the doctoral thesis of the anthropologist Raymond D. Berger.
 

 

3) Archive n.5

Going up to the top of the ranking, we find the fifth issue of the Archive which inaugurated the second cycle of the magazine. New graphics, new format and new editing, but the same desire to tell us the story through images and archival words, powerful and tremendously true at the same time. 

 

 

2) Ossì 5

Deserved second place for the most loved dirty magazine in Italy. For the fifth volume of this erotic saga, Alice Scornajenghi has put together a highly respected team that has struck and excited your heart (and beyond): words by Matteo Bianchi, playlist of Cosmo and artistic works by nude photographer Hester L Scheurwater. Boom!

 

  

1) BranD # 48

Frab's readers are habitual or simply love things that are beautiful and well done. On the top step of the podium, in fact, we find for the second consecutive year BranD magazine which with its forty-eighth edition has really surpassed itself by creating a real fetish object, inevitable in the libraries of those who consider paper and ink objects of art, experimentation and creativity. 

 

 

This was our top ten, but the real winners of the ranking are you who helped us build this beautiful community of rigorously independent and quality paper fetishists.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.