Jersey Art Book Fair is coming!

Dense Magazine is pleased to announce the first-ever Jersey Art Book Fair, with over 60 exhibitors coming to Jersey City Jan 28–29, 2023.

The Autobahn, Jersey Style

Co-founder Petia Morozov serves up a plateful of unlikely connections between the Autobahn and the NJ Turnpike, in the “World of Tomorrow.”

In the Circle of Sound

In Issue 1, University of Orange offers up their antidote to speeding past and around America’s Main Streets, and it’s music to our ears.

Getting Dense with Gabrielle Esperdy

Author and architectural historian Gabrielle Esperdy gives us her first-person account why New Jersey is one very complicated place to love.

Wading through the Future of New Jersey

SPURSE cofounder Iain Kerr brings us on location where their Issue 1 sci-fi story, “2021–2051” takes place, under the New Jersey Turnpike.

You from Jersey? What ecology?

Designers/educators Brian McGrath and Tommy CheeMou Yang walks us through Issue 1’s pattern book, and why we have central Jersey all wrong.

Getting Dense with Susan Yelavich

Design scholar and critic Susan Yelavich joins us to chat about her Jersey roots, her love of mystery film and "quaking” up on the Turnpike.

Lore of the Turnpike

From The Sopranos to artist Tony Smith, design scholar Susan Yelavich maps the Turnpike as a culture-shifting behemoth in Issue 1.

The Turnpike's Failure Is Our Cover

In 1988, videographer Don Bull captured a beautiful failure of the NJ Turnpike. Thanks to the magic of time, it now lives on as our cover.

5049 Miles on the Turnpike

Editor Gretchen Von Koenig considers the everyday design of rest stops and their power to distribute assumptions about people and place.

Smells like Jersey Spirit

Co-founder Petia Morozov unfolds our NJ Turnpike Scratch N Sniff Map, celebrating two hundred years after the 1951 Turnpike debut.

Weekly tangents about design and New Jersey, served up every Sunday.

Booth, Please is our weekly newsletter that explores the dreams, discoveries, confrontations, and epiphanies that emerge when design meets New Jersey—all set within the comforts of the world's diner capital.

Issue One