Goodbye Toro

As magazines go, Spacing doesn’t (or didn’t) have much in common with Toro Magazine. We generally covered different things, though one could argue their well done fashion shoots contributed to a better dressed populace, making for a more attractive public space experience (if one wanted to argue such a thing — maybe we don’t — but Donald Sutherland in french cuffs is an inspiration to us all). Our start-up situation were also direct opposites — they started with a big well-funded bang, Spacing started while sitting on the picky grass in a streetcar loop on Bathurst. But no matter the pedigree, we have to admire that they produced something on a such huge scale for Canada, and they should be commended for that kind of daring. And they did it well — it looked good and it was filled with interesting words strung together by people who could write.

So, it was sad this week to read they’re closing shop. It comes at a strange time for us, just as we are slowing establishing an office, not so far away from their Spadina HQ. And perhaps more so because this news comes on the heals of the cover story Dale Dundan wrote in Eye Weekly a few weeks back on tenuous life and death struggle independent magazines face in Canada. I think we sometimes feel it goes wihout saying that we want people to subscribe to Spacing, but maybe at this moment it’s ok to be a bit shameless and uncouth by saying, outright, if there’s a magazine you like, and that you’d like to see stick around, subscribe to it and give subscriptions of it away as gifts. Whether it’s us, or Shameless, or Taddle Creek, or Geist, or Kiss Machine, or even The Beaver — the best way to keep these things from burning out is to subscribe.

We’re in this for the long haul, like the folks at Toro were, but the road is littered with magazine corpses and we hope not to be one of them — so this isn’t a desperate plea, just stating the obvious, kind of like pointing to the elephant in the room that we also can’t always see.

We’ll miss having Toro on the Canadian landscape, and hope its employees find good homes elsewhere.