3 - Straddle

December 2005

PRINT EDITION: Sold out

One of my favourite ever Fuselit pieces popped up in Straddle. ‘Stradheil’ by Paul Haggar was a short piece, framed as an exhibit in the Paul Haggar Memorial Collection. Frankly, I couldn’t have been more thrilled to receive a piece as strange as this. If the magazine was seen as open to cheeky experimentation, so much the better! It was around this time that we also started to ask mailing list members and contributors for suggestions for future words. We stopped that a few issues later, because ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ came up a few too many times, and because of the planning needed when the magazine began to morph later on. The cover, a neck-down view of a woman with splayed legs, was by the fantastic Stacey Armes.

Straddle was the first time Fuselit went pocket-sized, down to an A6, although it remained stapled. This was my suggestion – as well as aesthetic reasons, I had this misguided idea that it would make things easier in the long run. The problem with a saddle-stitched miniature magazine is that there's hardly any margin of error when it comes to trimming the pages, so from this point up until we switched to Japanese stab-binding, we often had dangerously slender borders.