Where The Real Magazine Nerds In Hong Kong Actually Hang Out
Hong Kong has a publishing scene that most people walk right past. You get off the MTR at Admiralty, head toward the basement levels of Pacific Place or the older arcades around Lan Kwai Fong, and suddenly you are surrounded by stacks of magazines from across Asia that nobody else seems to notice. This is not about the glossy tourist guides at the airport. This is about finding the actual international titles that show up in weird corners of the city. Start at the Times Bookshop near the Central MTR station. It used to be called Times Books. They shifted locations around 2019 but the selection stayed roughly the same. You will find back issues of Monocle, Wallpaper*, and certain European architecture monthlies sitting on a shelf next to the travel section where most people never look. The staff there do not carry these in stock visibly. You have to ask. I asked once about a copy of Frame Magazine from issue 84 and the woman behind the counter walked to the back and pulled it out of a box marked Returns, no problem. The second place is Citysuper in IFC. Yes it is expensive. The magazine rack at the front has basically everything in English and some Cantonese titles you probably cannot pronounce. A few months ago I was trying to find a specific copy of Kinfolk with the Tokyo street photography spread and they had exactly three left. I picked one up for roughly HKD 120 which feels steep for a magazine but reasonable if you cannot find it online and need it that week.
If you want less obvious stuff, walk down to the basement of Lee Garden in Causeway Bay. There is a small newsagent run by an older man who imports magazines directly from Singapore and sometimes Macau. He does not put them in the front display. The foreign ones sit stacked in plastic sleeves behind the counter. I once found a vintage copy of Dazed & Confused from 2003 in a pile of old TV Guide HK editions. Not something you find every day. The third tip is completely unsexy. Hong Kong Public Libraries have magazine archives that are basically free. Visit the Wan Chai Reference Library or the Central Library and ask for the periodical section. They hold bound volumes of magazines going back years. You cannot take them home but you can read them on site. When I needed to cross reference advertising layouts from an issue of Design Milk around 2016, I spent two hours upstairs with a cup of coffee and zero cost. It worked perfectly. Do not trust the bookstore chain in Tsim Sha Tsui for anything niche. Their magazine selection is aggressively curated toward bestsellers and gift items. If you spend more than HKD 30 on a single magazine there, you are paying for the location, not the content. Stick to the places listed above and you will actually find what you are looking for.
One more thing nobody mentions. Hong Kong Comics books near Yau Ma Tei also carry international fanzines now and then. Small press Zines, art magazines from Berlin or Paris, things you cannot get online without waiting three weeks for shipping. I grabbed a Japanese indie photography mag there last year for HKD 45. The owner let me flip through the whole thing before buying. That alone makes the trip worth it. If you really want to dig deeper, check Reddit. The r/hongkong subreddit occasionally threads about obscure magazine stalls around North Point or Shek Tong Tsui. People reply with exact shop names that do not show up on Google Maps properly. I followed one suggestion to a tiny stall near the night market and found three issues of a UK based industrial design quarterly that had not been reprinted since 2012. These things are real. You just have to know where to look.
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