The Happy Reader grew out of a conversation between Penguin Books and Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom — the Dutch duo behind Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman — about what would happen if their way of making magazines were applied to classic literature. The answer arrived in November 2014: a 64-page bookish quarterly, priced at £3, edited by Seb Emina, a writer and the author of The Breakfast Bible who had never edited a magazine before and assembled one that felt like nothing else on the shelf.
The structure was beautifully simple. The first half of each issue featured a long, multi-week interview with a famous reader — not necessarily a literary figure but someone whose reading life was genuinely interesting. Dan Stevens, the first cover star, talked about books and bodybuilding and fatherhood. Later issues featured Jarvis Cocker, Ethan Hawke, Owen Wilson, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lily Cole, Grace Wales Bonner, and, in the final issue, Tilda Swinton. The second half took a single Penguin Classic — the Book of the Season — and pushed it through what Emina called a strange magazine machine: Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White produced a fashion shoot of women in white, a recipe for Count Fosco's favourite chocolates, and a walking map of the novel's London locations. Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway inspired Matthieu Lavanchy's luminous flower still lifes and Douwe Draaisma's essay on why time accelerates with age.
The magazine was designed by Penguin's Matt Young with a deliberate looseness — 64 pages exactly, the interview always ending at the staple, the cover design shifting subtly with each issue, the endpapers carrying hidden connections to the Book of the Season. Emina and his team crammed the margins with jokes, footnotes, crosswords, and obscure references that rewarded obsessive re-reading. The whole thing was designed to be held in one hand with coffee in the other, battered and folded like an actual book rather than preserved like a collector's item.
Across nineteen issues, The Happy Reader proved that a magazine about reading could be as playful, inventive, and visually striking as anything in fashion or design publishing. In 2023, Penguin pulled the plug. The final issue went out with Tilda Swinton and The Odyssey — a fitting exit for a magazine whose whole existence had been an epic journey through the pleasures of the printed word. Emina hinted that the unsatisfying total of nineteen issues left the door open for a twentieth. The happy readers are still waiting.
Explore The Happy Reader at <a href="https://www.thehappyreader.com/" target="\_blank">thehappyreader.com