A lot of people smell the magazines,” says Liz Lapp, the owner of Hi Desert Times, a shop in Twentynine Palms that bills itself as “Your Oasis of Print in the Desert.”
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Glossy magazines adorn the walls of the clean, minimally designed space, and publications are arranged on a reclaimed-wood table. As I talk with Lapp, a young Jodie Foster looks down on us from a framed six-foot reproduction of the June 1980 cover of Interview magazine. “They just love the smell. The memory you have with that,” she adds. I tell her that that had been my experience, too, when I attended her store’s opening party in July. The scent of fresh ink brought me back to a time when I devoured magazines cover to cover, before screens and notifications fragmented my attention span.
“A lot of people are like, ‘I just need a break from my phone,’ and they want to read something real, and they want to hold something,” Lapp says as she adjusts her signature tortoiseshell glasses.
I find myself gravitating to copies of the art quarterly Hi-Fructose, the stunning women’s magazine Violet, and the long-running U.K. film publication Sight and Sound. Lapp also introduces me to beautifully designed international magazines like Lightning, an obsessive style magazine from Japan; Hot Press, an Irish music publication; and Serviette, a Canadian food magazine. Each magazine is a three-dimensional object of information and beauty. From their fonts to their artwork, they all more than earn their high prices, which range from $22 to $42. (Hi Desert Times also sells copies of Alta Journal.)
Lapp and I reminisce about the days when newsstands were integral for learning about music, fashion, and art. We each frequented these spots to catch glimpses of worlds that we wanted to be a part of. In the heart of the Mojave, Lapp has curated a shop that’s reminiscent of iconic magazine stores like Casa Magazines in New York or magCulture in London. As both owner and enthusiast, she’s intimately acquainted with every zine on the shelves.
Born in Freedom, California, Lapp was a latchkey kid whose second auntie was television. She was an early print fan, making zines about River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves while also absorbing hours of TV ads every week from a young age, which led to her questioning why commercials motivate people to make purchases. That curiosity led her to study advertising at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. “Now I’m like, Yes, I know why I can get you to buy that toilet paper. That feels very powerful, especially when most of us don’t and we’re just walking around unconsciously buying the Charmin.”
Rather than continuing in advertising, she entered the art world, eventually cofounding her own gallery, Finch & Ada, and operating pop-ups at various spaces in New York. Using social media to market her shows, she launched herself into a new career in tech, working for digital-stock-image agency Shutterstock and platforms like Flickr, which was acquired by Yahoo.
Lapp and her husband, Stephen Lapp, were living in New York when she was recruited by Flickr in 2014. “I think this store is bigger than our apartment in the West Village,” Lapp says, “but it wasn’t easy to move.”
Yahoo took her from San Francisco to Los Angeles, where the couple lived until the pandemic hit and they moved to Yucca Valley, where she started her own social media consultancy business. When the world reopened, they wanted to give something back to the community that had taken them in. They opened Hi Desert Times in July 2023 and expanded to a second location, in the Joshua Tree Trading Post, in April.
“Maybe this can only happen in the desert,” Lapp says. “Maybe this can happen in a place where we’re a little less jaded. Where we give people a chance, or if you’ve decided to be part of the community, the community is going to decide that they want you to be a part of them.”
Lapp’s passion for print inspires an old-school sense of community that’s been lost to the digital age. She hosts community events, like monthly Desert Rat Roasters coffee pop-ups and the January launch party for Hi-Fructose’s newest issue, at which local artist Bunnie Reiss signed copies.
“Hi Desert Times makes me feel way more in touch in a place that can sometimes make you [feel] tucked away from the rest of the world,” says Vanessa Jane Lamb, a wedding and event photographer based in Joshua Tree. “Liz makes you feel welcome and has a love for print that is so palpable that you can’t help but be excited too.”
On social media, Lapp is the consummate printfluencer, writing about magazines on her free weekly Substack and dropping knowledge while brandishing her tiny microphone on Instagram. You may not be able to smell the magazines, but Lapp shares a lot of their flavor.•
Jennifer Lewis is the editor in chief and publisher of Red Light Lit, a small press and reading series established in 2013. She is the author of the short story collection The New Low, published by Black Lawrence Press.
