On Why One Founds The Reykjavík Grapevine

Sometime over the past 20 years, the reason became clear

Remember boredom? That thing that could happen to you before Steve Jobs gave us all an iPhone to stare at all day? The origins of this magazine stem from that. Boredom. I was 20. I was a temporary resident of Prague along with my dear friend Hilmar Steinn. He had decided we should move there for the winter after we graduated from Menntaskóli together in the spring of 2002. I drifted along since I had no other plans. We eventually moved into a small apartment in the suburbs, did some travelling around eastern Europe and the Balkans, but mostly just stayed put. We didn’t get jobs. Didn’t even try. The pay we thought was so low, that it didn’t seem worthwhile. So we drank beer, flâneured, got bored.

I remember waking up early on the first publication day to receive 20.000 copies of our first issue, fresh from the printing press and then thinking, “wait, how do we distribute this?”

Prague had an expat community of English speakers. Some of these had decided to found a fortnightly alternative tabloid called The Prague Pill. We read it and used it to navigate Prague’s bars and clubs, and to find things to do to stave off boredom.

Time passed. Our tenure in Prague was coming to an end and reality in Iceland was about to hit us again. We had not figured out what to do when we arrived back, but we both figured that we’d have to move to Reykjavík and probably get jobs. Or go to school. Or at least we subconsciously did. I can’t remember having a discussion about it. Neither of us had lived in Reykjavík before. It was all new. Scary. It was during those last weeks that the idea of founding The Reykjavík Grapevine was formed. We were, yet again, bored and drunk at a bar called Popo Café Petl in downtown Prague. In conversation, either me or Hilmar (neither remembers which) suggested that we should simply make a Reykjavík version of The Prague Pill. Both of us thought this a splendid idea, and once sobered up again, we went out to buy pens and paper and then proceeded to sketch out a mock up of how a Reykjavík alternative tabloid should look. So I guess it was not only boredom that influenced the founding of The Reykjavík Grapevine. There was also an existential crisis, as far as those go for two 20 year old privileged Western European dudes.

It didn’t dawn on me at least, until a couple of years into publishing this magazine, how valuable it was to be able to publish things that would probably never make it into other local media.

We moved back. Took some odd jobs. Eventually we rented a cellar on Blómvallagata, in 101 Reykjavík for about 25.000 a month and dragged our school pal and all around genius Oddur into the mix. Found a couple of graphic design students to work on the layout, one of them called Hörður, and hung up printed ads for writers in various downtown bars and fast food joints. That’s how we found Valur, the first editor. He read our ad while snacking on a Nonnabátur. Add Hilmar’s then girlfriend, photographer Aldís, and we had a team to put together the first summer of The Reykjavík Grapevine. Putting out the first issue was a real struggle, not least because none of us knew the first thing about publishing and we simply improvised as we went along, each of us learning where their strengths lay. For example, I remember waking up early on the first publication day to receive 20.000 copies of our first issue, fresh from the printing press and then thinking, “wait, how do we distribute this?” We just figured it out.

In 2003 the media environment, in Iceland and the rest of the world, was very different from what it is now. The internet was there and you could have your own blog, but there was no social media and if you wanted your opinion or ideas to have an impact you still had to do so through the old mediums; newspapers, television and radio. These had their gatekeepers. Their standards. Their own ideas about what was fit for publishing. It didn’t dawn on me at least, until a couple of years into publishing this magazine, how valuable it was to be able to publish things that would probably never make it into other local media. I can’t remember ever being bored during the first months and years of publishing this magazine, but it was only well after founding it, that I realised why it should have been founded in the first place: to embrace the alternative, to avoid mainstream narratives, to be a positive influence. To have something to say. To be helpful, insightful, but never comfortable.