We started in the spring of 2014 in a back room above a feed store, with a thirty-two-page first issue, six contributors, and ninety-two paying subscribers — most of them friends. The plan was a single year of issues; we'd see how it went, and then probably stop. Twelve years and forty-eight issues later, we have not stopped.

The magazine moved out of the feed store in 2017 to a small office above a bicycle shop, and again in 2022 to its current home in a converted brick firehouse a block off Higgins Avenue. The team is six people now, plus the four standing department editors, plus the photographers and contributors who turn up issue by issue.

The magazine has, almost without intending to, settled into a particular kind of writing — long, regional, slow, attentive. We don't run advertising. We don't run sponsored content. We don't run anything we wouldn't read out loud. We mail four issues a year to about eleven thousand subscribers across forty-three states and twelve countries, and we keep the lights on by being expensive: $48 a year, $24 for digital, no discount codes, no flash sales.

Most of what we do is mail one well-made object, four times a year, to people who like to be mailed well-made objects. The rest of what we do is here, online, free, with no tracking pixels and no pop-ups and no algorithm.