Today, average edgy urban dwellers can hardly step out of their live/work spaces without tripping over a copy of L'Uomo Vogue or Flaunt. Ask them where to acquire amoral European gossip rags or troubled leaflets from the French-Canadian intelligentsia, however, and they're likely to, understandably, go blank. The answers they seek await them at Smoke Signals, an international newsstand that stocks trashy British gossip magazines like Heat, the intellectually stimulating and financially unstable Montreal-based journal maisonneuve, obscure needlecraft magazines, and editions of Vogue from every corner of the globe, from Duluth to Papua New Guinea. Smoke Signals does one thing, and it does it well: It carries that one publication that seems to be missing from other newsstands in town, and for this obsessive-compulsive approach to thoroughness, we adore it.


