McSWEENEY'S HITS THE STANDS

THERE'S NO PRICE TO BE FOUND ON THE COVER OF McSweeney's a Farmers' Almanac-style compendium of smarty-pants wit and media industry critique. In its place, "If words are to be used as design elements then let designers write them." David Eggers, the 20-something founder and publisher of "McSweeney's" introduces his latest creation in a telling mixture of anachronism and irony: "People, people stop blaming yourselves! Have you forgotten: Timothy McSweeney's Blues/Jazz Odyssey? (For short say 'McSweeney' s') Known also as: `Pollyanna's Bootless Errand. Now fix your collar--Today could be your day!"

Eggers got his start at Might magazine, which was famous for such cover stories as "Are Black People Cooler Than White People?" In Might's "Sellout issue," every page of the magazine, including the cover, was sold to a corporate sponsor and the record reviews were written by record company PR departments. When Might folded after 16 issues Eggers was courted by mainstream magazines and spent a year as editor-at-large at Esquire. Put off by the industry's obsession with celebrity and circulation, Eggers left Esquire to start McSweeney's, a quarterly journal stocked with quirky pieces that are impossible to categorize. The latest issue features "Supreme Court Basketball" in which cases are retold in play-by-play with (basketball) court diagrams, and "Fire: The Next Sharp Stick?" which chronicles a Neanderthal board meeting. Instead of advertisements, McSweeney's offers its tongue-in-cheek "marketplace" of mail-order items: "#89, Used Lamp Bought at the Salvation Army Outlet and Hand-Delivered to Your Home on a Sunday Afternoon When it's Raining ($55.00)," and "#14, Pages Torn from an Annotated 1904 Bible ($2.95)" seem particularly appealing.

McSweeney's, which proclaims itself to be "conceived by faithless dummies" is a refreshing (if sometimes confusing) alternative to the thousands of glossy books produced by the corporate magazine industry.

McSweeney's can be found at Nini's Corner for $7.95 or on the web at www.mcsweeneys.net.