SOME aspects of heading a public company take a bit of getting used to. “It says what? That I earned £141,000? Where?” James Brown’s little Yorkshire-terrier face looks momentarily stunned. Page 19 of your last annual report. Remuneration for 2001. “But I didn’t — £120,000 tops.”

Brown, 37, magazine wunderkind and chief executive of I Feel Good (IFG), studies the annual report, then tosses it aside. “Oh well,” he grins.

This week he reports his second set of annual figures for IFG, publisher of a clutch of titles including Viz, the adult comic, and Jack, a men’s monthly. More pressingly, he also has to address the bid that rather surprisingly landed on his desk last Tuesday. Someone wants to buy his firm. This Easter, it seems, is a weekend for hard choices.

Why the fuss? Because Brown has a track record. IFG, quoted on the Alternative Investment Market, may be small fry compared with the global magazine players, but its founder, the man who created Loaded and hence kick-started the lucrative lad-mag market, still has a large fan club.

Speculation as to who would want to snap up his loss-making firm has ranged from the usual magazine suspects to Brown himself, taking the company private, or a bid from his friend and mentor, the wealthy publisher Felix Dennis.

With the IFG share price at 6½p, well below its 2000 placing price of 32p, that offers opportunity but also the potential for leaving some early investors out of pocket. Brown, who has 15m shares in the firm, can’t comment on his intentions or confirm the identity of the bidder. But he does drop heavy hints that whoever is bidding, it ain’t him.

“I was sitting in a club last night at 1am, and I thought, I should be so happy. I’ve got a wife, a kid, and some guy is waving all this cash at me.”

But Brown is not happy. He’s on edge. He says his staff have been in to tell him they don’t want to be gobbled up by a mainstream publisher.

So what’s going on? He can’t say. Sitting in his fourth-floor warehouse office in London’s Clerkenwell, he twists his short, slight frame this way and that, veering his mood between friendly and prickly.

With his black mop of curly hair and designer glasses, the blue motifed shirt and the Paul Smith suit, he looks more like an ad-agency creative chief than a magazine boss. Behind him, on the bare brick wall, hangs a huge blown-up photo of his baby son, seven days old, seemingly flicking a V at the world with an upstretched right hand.

That gesture defines the approach that has taken Brown to the top of the magazine tree. Leeds-born, with no A-levels, no university education, he has jumped from fanzines to the music press to editorships at mainstream publishers IPC and Condé Nast, cutting a swath through the more timorous on his way and, at one stage, revelling in a reputation for drink and drug consumption that would make a 1970s rock star proud.

Cocaine in the fridge at Condé Nast? “Not sure it was ever around long enough to get to the fridge,” he giggles.

He edited GQ for a year-and-a-half in an uneasy relationship with Condé Nast’s UK boss, Nicholas Coleridge, before leaving to set up IFG. Quite how Coleridge, an Old Etonian smoothie, and Brown, the artful dodger druggie from Leeds’ Lawnswood High, managed even 18 months together surprises some. “Nah, we got on all right,” grins Brown, before complaining that Coleridge kept getting at him for coming in late.