It has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt that paper is dying medium. But in the meantime, just try to find a publishing niche that isn’t being filled by one or more glossies. Submitted in evidence: Conceive, The Magazine for Couples Who Get it On, But Can’t Bring it On Home. (Ok, that’s not really their slogan, but is “Celebrating the Creation of Families” any better?)

The Quarterly is clearly done on the cheap—there’s a fair amount of generic stock imagery—but it’s a relatively attractive magazine, with airy, understated and elegant type treatments, and only a few pages that made my skin crawl—including a feature on romantic bedroom furniture for baby making. Listen, a dirt cave floor was good enough for our primitive ancestors, it ought to be good enough for us.

The bedroom feature isn’t actually all that out of keeping with the rest of the content, Conceive articles orbit around traditional women’s magazine topics: hearth, home, romance, fashion and style—but all of these are geared around getting, or being knocked-up—which brings me to the second feature that made my skin crawl—the “Conceived” section which looks at “the next step.” While childhood is at least is off the radar (and actual offspring would doubtlessly require getting rid of that dangerous canopy bed that seemed soooooo important a few months earlier), it does take an aspirational glance at all the things you’ll need when you’re in a family way. Can you sell maternity wear to a barren couple? Conceive wants to know, and whatever the answer, Scrooge McDuck would be proud.

One neat little feature Conceive has that I’d never seen before, and is clearly useful if you’ve ever tried to relate coverlines to the contents page of a typical woman’s magazine is visual guide to where things are (see TOC, lower right-hand corner). Of course, if one really wanted to be user-friendly one could just put page numbers on the cover. No, that’s crazy talk.

Update: Jane, at least for a while, had a similar visual cover index.