WILL UNWOUND #212: “The One Dollar Magazine” by Will Manley
August 25, 2010My family hates it when I revert to “back in my day” ramblings, and I know that some of you don’t like it either, especially the younger ones among you, but darn it, this is my blog, I am now 60 and soon to be 61, and somehow what I did 50 years ago is more immediate to me that what I did last week. That’s one of the really, really, really weird things about getting old…long term memory sharpens as short term memory dulls. Go figure.
Anyway….back in my day 50 years ago…Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were big days for me. Tuesday, was the day Time magazine arrived; on Wednesday it was Life; and the best thing about Thursday was the arrival of my absolute favorite magazine, Sports Illustrated.
These three magazines were my windows to the world. They were more global than the local newspaper and more diverse than the three reigning television stations. I still love getting magazines. Now, however, Golf Digest and Martha Stewart’s Living are the magazines that put a smile on my face when they appear in the mail box.
What has happened to Time, Life, and Sports Illustrated? Well, Life is dead (how’s that for irony?) and Time and Sports Illustrated are obsolete. CNN, ESPN, and the internet have rendered Time and SI irrelevant.
Yesterday, I read a news story on the internet that Newsweek was recently sold by the Washington Post Company for $1 to a 92 year old stereo equipment magnate. There’s something richly symbolic about that sale price and something equally symbolic about the age of the buyer. Many magazines have gone from being a driving force in the zeitgeist to becoming nothing more than the nostalgic old memories of a 60 year old’s mind.
Today, unwinders, my issue is this: What are your libraries doing about magazines? With dwindling budgets do you still buy them, and how do you determine which ones to still buy? What do you do about the back issues? Are they getting weeded and discarded faster than before? Finally are your patrons still reading them? In my local library the average age of the “regulars” in the periodical room (count me as one of them) is about 72. Finally, do you miss magazines? I am starting not to read most of my old favorites because they are so skimpy and dated. Clearly Time and Newsweek are on their last legs, and Sports Illustrated has lost its focus.
Will, I’m older than you, so I get to take advantage. In my household, “Look” (long dead) replaced “Life”. “SI” was a luxury that was unaffordable. (BTW, they give it away now to non-libraries. The premium that comes with the subscription is worth more than the cost of subscribing. You just have to dispose of the paper. And, as always, the “12 month subscription” extends for about 18 months.) But my real favorite was “Boys’ Life”. As a city boy in Southern California, I learned more about dust bowl soil conservation and contour plowing than I ever wanted to know. But there were some great stories. “I read it for the stories” predated “I read “Playboy” for the interviews by at least a decade.
As an aside, can someone (Mick?) give a quick tutorial on HTML tags and web citations for this site? I feel like a doofus.
As to how we deal with mags, we have very few. Those that we do get are popular and go into circ almost immediately. We toss them after a year. We’ll have to look more closely as our ethnic profile changes. At the moment, a Canadian-Italian newspaper and a couple of Italian magazines suffice. I think that magazines “from home” have (and will have)a bigger role in our collection than domestic stuff.
Comic books (Archie, heaven help us!) are another matter.
Bill. Try using just basic formatting commands. here’s a sentence in bold
here’s a sentence in italic
You use the left bracket < the commands: b for bold, i for italic, then a right bracket. To terminate the sequence you just type the same command with a / before the command. If I actually do it it will hide the command, so I'm trying to tell you how without invoking it, which will hide it from you.
Thanks, Mick. The caret/square bracket option was throwing me. The experimentation I was doing was in trying to add links to a URL. Nothing was working for me there.
OK. Just a plain link is done with normal syntax and no fancy commands. Just http colon backslash and the URL. This will turn up as a link, but the http part will disappear: http:/www.fvrl.org
Bill, thanks for bringing up comic books. That’s a great subject for a future post. Want to do it?
I’ll pass on the comic books as a topic. The line between them and graphic novels is too thin and GNs are well outside my experience
Ooo, ooo! (Extra geezer point for recognizing Officer Tootie (Fred Gwynne’s partner)
I forgot my Dad’s magazines — “True” and “Argosy”. Both with good stuff. Erle Stanley Gardner’s non-fiction reports an “The court of the last resort” and Virgil Parch’s “Vip” cartoons. A real introduction to being an adult.
And yet another “Oooo”. “Saturday Evening Post” at my grandparents’ (Yay! Cub Scout magazine drives!) That was my introduction to quality trash fiction. The Tugboat Annie stories. Alexander Botts, the farm equipment salesman stories. By no means least, Paul Gallico’s Hiram Holiday stories and his golf stories (Those were in a class with P.G. Wodehouse’s golf stories). I think that Max Schulman even published some of his stuff (Dobie Gillis, et al) there. I think that Salinger was long done with the Post by the time I started to read it.I really miss that kind of outlet for solid popular fiction.
If there had been a “SEP” around, wonderful writers like Dave Duncan might not have had to wait until they were retired and able to write novels before they got published.
Thanks for the tip on Gallico’s golf stories. Will have to look them up.
I still go to the library and checkout magazines on painting, Watercolor Magic or The Artist’s Magazine. Can’t really replace those with an online source. They are browsing magazines that I look at often. I will not however spend $8.95 for a magazine. I also like to browse woodworking magazines even though I do not do woodworking. I guess it is a fantasy magazine for me.
I love magazines but they hurt themselves with their pricing, downsizing, and weak content. Also those cards they insert are annoying. If I could wave a magic wand, I would love to have subscriptions to a dozen magazines. Maybe when I am on medicare, in 10, 15, or 20 years, I can go to the doctor’s office and catch up on the old issues I have missed.
Douglas…my dentist has the best magazine collection around. She even started stocking golf magazines …just for me. Of course, a good part of my disposable income goes to her.
I’m a bit younger than Will however, I too remember looking forward to reading the new editions of certain magazines when they were published – Newsweek every week and then Stereo Review and Rolling Stone when they were published.
And ebook fan that I am I have to point out that Apple in conjunction with popular news, and other, magazines and journal companies had better get with the program and go digital or they are going to go out of business.
To elaborate on that I own an iPad which I love, except for the magazine issue! In relation, my print Newsweek subscription expired at the end of March and knowing I was getting an iPad the first week of April I didn’t renew it as I expected to subscribe to the e-version. And then to my unpleasant surprise the e-version of Newsweek and Time –are being sold via Apple apps for $5.00 and issue – instead of a yearly subscription fee. And I won’t pay $5.00 an issue for any magazine (not on a regular basis anyway) so I read both titles weekly at the library where I work and Newsweek and Time don’t make any money from me!
Having said that we haven’t yet stop subscribing to popular periodicals at the library where I work – they do circulate and people do read them – not nearly at the level they read our new books or check out our DVDS – but they do read them. However, I have wondered recently about the grey Kindle area…If we stopped circulating magazines at my library and only allowed people to read them in-house on a Kindle (or some other e-reader like an iPad – but Kindle periodical subscriptions are cheaper) we could greatly reduce the amount of money we spend on periodicals only the two local newspapers would of necessity have to be purchased in their paper form.
Bu then again the iPad offers a color screen and one although Time and Newsweek aren’t available by subscription – National Geographic was – and the pictures are undoubtedly better in color than they’d be in grey backed e-ink.
I wonder – does anyone out there have magazines or newspapers available for patrons to read in their library on a Kindle, and iPad or some other e-reader?
Linda, what do you think of the content of the “new” Newsweek. It me it has turned into a platform for weekly opinion columns. Very little news.
I agree with you about Newsweek now being a shadow of its former shelf. I don’t really get my news from Newsweek even though I read it every week.
Instead I get my news from Roku’s Newscaster (it offers many shows on demand from CNN, NBC, NPR etc. and features shows like Fareed Zakaria’ s GPS, Meet The Press, CNET programs etc.
Having said that I really read most of my news now on my iPad via apps like the New York Times Editor’s Choice, Fluent, Rutgers Galleries and NPR.
In our library we keep dropping paper in lieu of electronic. We receive some popular titles in print for the students to enjoy – Sports Illustrated, Time, Vogue, GQ, the local paper and the New York Times.
I’ve dropped subscriptions here at home. I’m down to two cooking magazines, The New Yorker and Smithsonian. I was thinking about canceling one of the cooking magazines and by gosh! the issue I received today was chock-full of recipes I’ve got to try. Maybe I’ll keep receiving it …
Ellen…the New Yorker was a fave of mine for many years. Then when Updike died I stopped reading it.
I received quite a shock from The New Yorker recently. I’ve subscribed to it since 1986 so I’ve never had a reason to pay attention to the cover price. But I happened to recently notice that it is up to $5.99! I cannot imagine anyone picking up an issue at a newstand or bookstore at that price. No more grumbling at my next renewal payment, that’s for sure.
We love magazines at our house. I felt the demise of Time a while ago. The magazine content got smaller as the ads increased and eventually anyone who preferred the ratio to be the other way, quit subscribing. I do still think there are some quality periodicals out there if you are willing to pay for them. We get a student subscription to The Economist, which is wonderful, and one of my son’s favorites (although $70 for a student subscription is still expensive.) We used to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and the daily New York Times, both of which are prohibitively expensive, and we sadly cut WSJ this year. Now we fight over who gets what section of the Times in the morning.
One of my other obsessions is shelter magazines and those have disappeared faster than the Concorde.
When Domino was shut down, one of the editors decided to create an online magazine called Lonny Magazine. The layouts are just as fun as the old magazine and they are getting great advertising because of the ability, through direct links, to allow readers to purchase an item they see in the magazine. Do I like it as well? Nope. I love sitting in my living room and reading about these beautifully photographed homes, not in front of a screen that doesn’t give me as large a page as the print version. I like to rip out pages and put them in my “Design File” which would be difficult to do with an online version (although you can purchase CD versions and save the files.) Recently, all five major shelter magazines changed editors (it was like musical chairs,)so I’m not sure what this bodes for their future.
For me magazines are part of my entertainment budget and these days I can subscribe to most of them for about $5 on special sales from Amazon. At those prices they will all be sure to disappear in the near future.
I work at an academic library and we only subscribe to a few popular magazines(which do not circulate) for the casual reading area of the library and most everything else we get through databases.
Tensy…speaking of the WSJ, they have wonderful book reviews.
I simply don’t know what the lib is doing. The only time I see magazines is at the barber shop where Chuck gets Car & Driver, and Hemmings Motor News where I can look up my old cars and see what a fortune it would be to get one again. I do get Navy Times because they almost pay me and beg me to take it, but overall the magazine industry is in serious decline across the board. Have you seen Scientific American lately? It’s shocking, a shadow of its former self. I couldn’t care less about Lamestream Media rags. I’m happy to see them go. But Byte? I once had a complete run of them. It’s sad.
On the other side of the coin I keep getting magazines I did not subscribe to, like Popular Mechanics. After a year or two they keep pestering me to renew when I didn’t sign up in the first place. Very strange.
It seems to me that the push to digital is gaining steam here. The NRA wants me to ‘convert’ to a ‘digital’ version. It’s the same with bills. No one wants to send a statement any more, so they are strongly ‘suggesting’ I can ‘view my statement online.’ Eventually they will start charging for a paper statement, is my guess. They are easing us into it just like they are easing us away from paper checks.
You certainly cannot classify me as a luddite, but it scares me a bit. The potential for online fraud is immense, and this conversion will be forcing us to buy an online commercial service to keep up with our finances. The US Postal Service, a constitutional mandate, is doomed.
Mick, I think you are very perceptive about the subtle but definite shift to on-line commerce. What will happen to the post office? That’s a great question.
I do not think a person is a luddite who does not want to pay bills online. There is no such thing as a “secure server.” I hate writing a check at a store only to have the clerk hand it back to me, voided, and my purchase handled by debit. If I wanted to use my debit card, I would. Paper checks cost me money, and if they are just going to be voided, tell me in advance!
As a matter of fact, I have been using my debit card at stores for years.
The only paper magazines to which we subscribe are SyFy and Mopar Collectors Guide. We also receive Southern Traveler, American Libraries, YALS and Public Libraries because of my membership in AAA, ALA, YALSA and PLA.
The “we” to which I refer is my husband and me. My library carries approximately 95 subscriptions between 4 (soon to be 5) branches.
We still have magazine subscriptions and they’re still read. They circulate the back issues. The notion of keeping anything as a reference tool, however, has definitely gone the way of the dinosaur. We just got rid of our last bound magazines (Life, Time, American Heritage) That kind of shocks me. We don’t keep anything as a reference tool anymore. It’s as though there’s some kind of tacit understanding that the Internet will always be there.
I love magazines and read them for all of the 5 minutes I wait for my dental hygeinist twice a year. The magazine I read most often is Family History Magazine (no surprise for a genealogy librarian.)
Beth O….you raise a fascinating point. In today’s world what has happened to the reference collection?
Reference book are almost dead. When are addition/renovation is finished we will be interfiling ours with the non-fiction in the hope that more people will find and use them.
Actually, they offered my department the bound magazines. Some of them–American Heritage, Life–do have some bearing on Local History and Genealogy. However, I don’t have room for the journals I already have. Also, I would prefer that my professional colleagues didn’t think of my department as The Ark, i.e., someplace you put something you don’t want but you don’t want to get rid of.
We still have magazines. I know because someone on staff leaves copies of the gossip rags in the basement women’s restroom. Given that the back issues of Playboy are stored right outside of the men’s room, I can only guess what gets left in there.
The branches only keep 6 months, but it’s surprising how many times an issue is checked out when it comes time to pitch it. While the trend was going electronic, it’s going to be harder to eliminate the print with the unfortunate move toward publishers licensing the electronic version to a single aggregator.
Personally, our household gets Trains, Classic Trains, and Railpace (you sense a theme here?). That doesn’t count magazines from organization memberships like The Glass Bead, Tile Heritage, and American Libraries. I used to get Sunset and Bon Appetit, but when too many piled up still in the plastic wrapper, I decided in the name of the environment I should quit. And who needs Bon Appetit when half of the recipes are on Epicurious?
met…thanks for the interesting comment. Glad you mentioned American Libraries. It keeps cutting back on the number of issues it publishes per year. Also the on-line edition of AL has all kinds of advantages.
Sadly, I must admit that I rarely actually read American Libraries. I love the American Libraries Direct emails and I occasionally click through something on their Facebook page. The print tends to languish in the mail I’m going to get to someday pile.
Sadly, budget cuts are taking a toll on subscriptions of any kind, but where I work– school libraries– we are defending print magazine and database budgets fiercely. In response to budget cutting, the district issued a blanket statement: “No subscriptions.” We subscribed anyhow. Magazines are instructional materials, end of argument.
High interest print magazines are great for getting reluctant readers engaged and encouraging them to use the library. Kids who aren’t fluent in English can understand the gist of articles from the photos, motivating them to work on their English skills. Magazines also support classes like fashion design and professional cooking.
Newspapers are different. Students prefer to use these online, either the sections provided free, or through the databases. No more print newspapers
I was struck by a comment by a school librarian in a high poverty area: “Most of the kids don’t have any magazines at home.” At school, kids love them (this is grades 6-12, primarily).
So, short answer, here and now, print magazines serve an important function. Tomorrow? Not sure…
Jeanne, thanks for the important perspective. Kids that do not have magazines in the home are definitely at a disadvantage.
I work at a university library, so the trend has been toward databases and electronic periodicals increasingly ever since the early 90s. Today’s students are so clueless about how to find articles in print or microfilm resources you literally have to walk them through the entire process. I figure in five years we won’t have any print subscriptions at all, except for the small literary journals that are still publishing, and maybe a few mass market popular magazines for recreational purposes.
The only magazines I still subscribe to personally are The Progressive (for over 30 years and just converted my subscription to an e-subscription at no extra cost for their iPad subscribers, Frommer’s Budget Travel, and AARP Magazine. I also occasionally buy issues of Iphone Life (they have lots of good articles on apps and the Ipad) and Smart Shopping.
Denise…I bet that the Frommer’s Budget Travel saves money in the long run.
Magazines are very popular – especially cooking, home improvement, and gardening titles. Surprisingly, many of the teen titles we get are also really popular. They don’t take them out, but they are loved to death in house. Go figure. Children’s titles have been the ones to go the way of the dodo here. We renew subscriptions to the ones that move, the rest get the hook. Keep back issues for a year or so, as most are available through an online database to which we subscribe. I believe that part of the popularity is that we allow even brand new issues to circulate (one week), and don’t limit the number of issues that any one person can take.
Me too, Meeeeee tooooo! Gardening, decorating, cooking and the pretty history magazines are popular as well as the gossip/people magazines. They are in tatters by the end of the month.
My most recent whine against magazines is the latest cover of Rolling Stone. I just SO need to get my magazines out from the main drag from the front door to the children’s department.
Leslie…do the kids still read Cricket?
sadly, no – but big upswing in pb kid’s books – so maybe going in that direction?
The demise of U.S. News and World Report was a blow to me. When I was in school I was on the speech and debate team. For one of the speech events you would have 45 minutes to prepare a speech on a current event topic assigned at the tournament. For that, we would haul boxes of U.S. News… around with us. When I was young I subscribed to Fantasy and Science Fiction and Amazing Stories at home, as well as reading my Father’s Scientific American. My personal heyday of magazine subscriptions was when my daughter was in school. The kids had to sell magazine subscriptions every year. Guess who bought them all?
Our libraries are located in a rural area. We run the gamut from the very poor in some communities where the “foxfire” lifestyle is style the reality, to the very rich who retire here because Florida is too hot and humid. Hunting, cooking, fishing, and NASCAR popular magazines. So are local magazines, architectural digest, Mother Earth, and Morning Star. We have a big retirement community (average age for our population is 48, and it rises every year.) Therefore, print magazines are still important. Broadband is not easily accessible and many home either have dial-up or no computer at all.
We keep back issues for 2 years (6 weeks for newspapers), then give them to the Friends of the Library to sell. We can’t afford e-journals which are ridiculously high-priced, so the only ones we have are through a State cooperative that is free to in-state libraries.
By the way – why don’t the bigger public and academic libraries band together to force e-publishers to do reasonable pricing? To bad we don’t hae a trade organization for libraries. Oh, wait! We do – the ALA. A lot of help they are.
Deb…I’m fascinated by the demographics in your library’s service area. The diversity must present interesting challenges.
Yes, Will. In addition to the above, we now have a growing Hispanic population. Plus there is a Native American reservation in our service area. There are a number of Eastern Europeans who come here each summer to work; they are avid library users – they like to read their hometown papers on the Internet. The Appalachian Trail runs through here so we get a lot of hikers using the free public access Internet to check email, update their blogs, etc. Add to that, we are deeply in the Bible Belt, but also have a large gay and lesbian community, not to mention a local Wiccan coven and a number of new-age groups. Plus a number of artists and crafters. Our population is small, but very diverse, and in our small libraries with very limited funds, collections and programming can be very interesting.
By the way – apologies for the massive typos in my post this morning – I was called away to a meeting and didn’t have time to reread it.
Wow, Deb. Collection Development must be a challenge for you. I’d love to hear more. Care to do a guest post for Will?
I’m with you. I loved US News & World Report.
Growing up my mother got us a magazine subscription every year for Christmas. It was a great gift because long after Christmas we got something in the mail. I remember graduating from Jack and Jill to Highlights to Teen (something).
At the library we’ve still got magazines but not as many. People still look at them but it has become a browsing collection, no longer research. The customers who browse them are usually older and a lot of time waiting for the bus to come.
Funny story about age: My 14-year-old daughter asked me yesterday if when she’s in college, she can email me her papers to look over. I told her yes and then reminisced about Grandma looking over my papers before I typed them on the typewriter and how excited I was to get a typewriter with a correction ribbon. Once she quit laughing, she looked at me and said “What’s a correction ribbon?”
Kids keep us in line, don’t they?
Thank goodness for those correction tapes and even liquid paper! Boy I sure do remember my dismay at typing up library card applications and making a mistake and then having to use liquid paper and try and line up the application in the typewriter so that my new and corrected text was on the same line as the old text- so I agree those self correcting typewriters were great!
Reminiscences aside I really love word processing via computers because if you make a mistake you can so easily back space or cut the text and type over it and then all the text lines up and no one would ever know (assuming you proff read the whole document) that you made a mistaken and you don’t ever have to hassle with spilling liquid paper on your clothes. (that darn stuff never did come out very well!)
Gretchen…you bring back memories. Getting a magazine in the mail box with your name on it was a big deal when we were kids.
I am in an academic library and we are continuing with magazines along with as many of the academic titles as possible with a long-running flat budget. Time, Newsweek, and other news magazines are still among the most popular (by usage) of any titles.
I read about 12 of these on a regular basis, since there is no other news/opinion source that provides the depth that print magazines provide (Atlantic, Harper’s, New Yorker, The Nation, etc.)– most of them are now available in e-format, but the print format is more comfortable to read in my coffee shops over the lunch hour.
My world without these would be drabber and less informed.
Bill, what do you think of the new “Newsweek.” I miss the solid news departments. Now it seems like it is all opinion columns. We get enough opinions everywhere. I loved how Newsweek compressed the weeks news into 30 or so pages.
We still have quite a few magazine subscriptions. The state library standards call for a ridiculously high number for what they consider “excellent” service. We are only “moderate”. (Scale = Basic, Moderate, Enhanced, Excellent) The ones that remain popular are the ones for hobbyists and crafters and the cooking, gardening, and home decorating titles. We only subscribe to one magazine at home, the Official Xbox Magazine, because they include demo discs of new games so my spouse and son can try them out before deciding to buy. My husband is a news junkie, but he gets it from TV or the Internet. The news magazines of any sort (world events, sports, entertainment) that we have at the library circulate poorly and are slowly being phased out. Magazines for special interests or that include “projects” are comparable to our books on the same subjects, which are very popular, I’m sure, just about anywhere.
Stacey, the consensus seems to be that hobbyists still read their favorite magazines.
This is true. My husband subscribes to his model railroading magazines because they are a little too specialized for the library, but the library carries woodworking, needlework, crafts, and pet magazines. Interestingly, even though our demographic is older, we had to drop Elderhostel for lack of interest.
There is no question that Newsweek and Time have evolved in pursuit of their changing and shrinking advertising demographics, so that I tend to skim rather than read them. I really miss PC Magazine. Their product reviews were excellent. Nothing on the Internet, let alone TV, has the combination of coverage, depth, reliability and usefulness that these magazines used to have. One magazine where the standards are still high is the New Yorker. Consumer Reports has evolved; it is frightfully upscale, but it is still essential for libraries and for consumers like me who have little trust in brand names any more. However, they don’t know anything about computers.
Wayne…where does one go for good computer product reviews?
Will, I really don’t know. Wayne
My husband uses his airline miles that are about to expire to get magazines. We currently get Wired and the Atlantic and Sports Illustrated. Articles from the Atlantic often end up in our Sunday paper or my husband sees them online in the blogs he reads.
I get a parenting magazine (it was either on sale at Amazon or free when I purchased some toy), but most of the time I read it and it gets recycled. My daughter likes looking at the ads or pictures of babies!
My school library still subscribes to 9 magazines for the kids. Budget cuts meant we had to cut back and we no longer get teacher magazines. Plus some magazines went out of print (Nick and Disney Adventures). We get American Girl — way too expensive for 6 issues a year; Appleseeds; Boy’s Life; Discovery Girls; Kids Discover; Nat. Geog. for Kids; Sports Illus. for Kids; Your Big Backyard; and Ranger Rick. Third grade is the first year they can check out magazines so they are very popular at the beginning of the year and then it wanes. The kids do like looking at them while in the library. A lot of them get them at home because our school does a fund raiser with QSP every year. The parents buy them so they can contribute money to the school (we’re a private school).
A lot of the magazines actually are running ads right now touting that young people are still reading and subscribing to magazines.
Kathy…an emgerging theme is that magazine sales drives by students may be saving the magazine industry!
I send magazines of his/her choice to each of our six grandchildren, and they do read them although part of the ‘thrill’ is to have mail in his/her own name!! Ranger Rick, Highlights, High Five, Discovery Girls, DC Comics are some of the choices in the past two years.
Magazines in libraries are still important in my opinion for adults and for children.
I think it is sad that magazines are failing. The one’s I subscribe to can be read online but I much prefer to read them in magazine form. Paste (a music mag.) is my favorite.
Interestingly, my girls, age 15 and 12, absolutely love magazines such as Seventeen, Fitness, and GL. And they also love the Internet. They are you tube fanatics, read manga online, and facebook constantly (while texting). But getting a real magazine in the mail still thrills them.
And, BTW, they think e-readers are stupid. They say they will never give up reading real books. My daughter Caitlin has to use an iPad in her high school business and biology classes and doesn’t like it. She is used to a PC and finds it a pain to use.
Matt…thanks for the info. My sense is that there will be an eventual reaction against e-readers. I really believe that people will revert back to paper.
Matt – Ditto my kids, ages 8 & 12. The 8 yo would stay on the computer 10 hours a day if we let him, yet he is thrilled when his magazines come and sits down right away to read them. My daughter has discovered a great new magazine – Kiki. It’s expensive for 4 issues, but has no ads and has a lot of info about fashion without all the inappropriate ads and articles about dating that other tween girl mags have. It also tells kids a lot about the background of the fashion industry – what it’s like to be a designer, model, etc. It usually features a place (Paris, New Orleans) each issue and has articles related to the locale. If your library can afford it, I recommend it. There are lots of places in the magazine to write and draw your own designs, so online doesn’t work so well.
The trouble with periodicals is the minute you decide to eliminate a title, someone will come in asking for it, and when you do not have it, tempers flare. Well maybe that is an execration, but it is very difficult to determine which titles to keep, as many of the magazines do not circulate in our library, we use in house usage as the main factor in deciding which titles to keep.
As for back issues we keep only one year, we simply do not have the space for more, and it just seems silly to but old magazines in storage. Our guilty pleasure arrives in the mail on Friday we skim through it before it makes it way to the back room to be cataloged and that would be the highly informative People.
Susan…that should be Ranganathan’s 6th law of library science: the minute you weed something; a patron asks for it.
Each year when it comes time to cut the library budget, magazines are among the first to go under the ax, but we still carry a goodly number and they are popular. Patrons read them in-house as well as check them out. I notice that young mothers often grab a hand full of mags after they’ve finished with story times–they tell me that they don’t have time to read books but can squeeze in magazines.
I love magazines for that very reason, too, even though I’m not busy raising kids. Sometimes my mind can’t take in the plot of a book, but I can read a magazine or two & actually learn something. Doubt I’ll renew “Newsweek” but intend to keep a couple of the cooking ones as well as general interest ones as they keep me plugged in to what patrons ask me about. And I read “People” whenever I’m waiting to get my hair cut but only for the book reviews (really!) I have no idea who the so-called celebrities are anymore, which I assume is the first step into geezer-hood.
Carol Ann…what’s up with all the interest in cooking mags? Do people really try the recipes or do they just savor the photos?
Yes to both.
Will, We are still heavily invested in magazines, newspapers and newsletters. Being who we are, “Ethnic Studies Library” most of our communities publications are not available via database subscriptions and in many places are not considered to be “scholar worthy.”
All Best, John B, U.C. Berkeley
“Ethnic Newswatch” doesn’t even begin to cover the ground thought it is worthy in lieu of nothing else.
Any materials not being considered scholarly is something that for the life of me I can’t figure out, other than to assign it to ignorance and/or covert racism.
I look forward to my Tribal newspaper, and btw you forgot to mention National Geographic.
John…I wondered when National Geographic would come up in the discussion. I did forget it. How could I forget it? Everyone used to have moldy piles of them in their basement. Thanks for bringing it up.
Used to? We still regularly get patrons coming in attempting to donate the things.
Well, I’d love to have any that are not mildewed and predate 1980.
So, if you are looking for a place to unload them send those National Geos to me!
Best, John B
JBerry@library.berkeley.edu
Wow, John, you best be careful with that offer. You may need to buy a new mailbox.
As always, any overages we get in donations I resend out to Tribal Libraries who request them. Additionally I’ve never met a school that would turn them down – failing all else they make good cut ups for the kids projects.
I also despise people who dump perfectly good and unwanted books into recycling bins because they are to lazy to do anything else with them. For that I use Better World Books, if the Tribes don’t want them.
Will,
You may get your wish. There are studies being done about the affect of t.v.s, computers on the brain. If negative publicity comes out that too much technology affects the brain, watch how quickly print material is in demand again. Our library has a large magazine collection. Older issues circulate for a year. Patrons want to read magazines but not pay the high subscription prices.
Magazines are still very much in vogue with our patrons. A few years ago, we made a decision to emphasize environmental and sustainable living titles. This collection receives brisk use and keeps our circulation numbers at a respectable level.
Personally I crave magazines in paper format. The feel and sound of turning pages, sensory overload from the richness of photos and the surprise of turning to the next page.
Where would we be if technology failed tomorrow? Searching for those pre 1980 National Geographic issues Mr. Berry desires. I bet we’d even settle for a few moldy copies if …
Reminds me of a story from when I lived in a certain near-Boston suburb/city. (Outside of Boston, but a city itself.) The husband of a friend would consistently not get his Hockey News, would call the Post Office, and it would arrive the next day all beat up. The upshot of this was that the postal employees were all reading it. I realize now he should have told the library so they could purchase a subscription for the community.
I still get The New Yorker, and keep all my back copies. They just seem too interesting to recycle. [If anyone would like them from 2005 to date, get Will to contact me. I have tried to give them to any of our local libraries but they have all refused.]
We also get The Atlantic, Wired, Nutrition Action Newsletter, Popular Science, some computer magazines for my SO and Fortean Times for me. Also we get all of the library magazines that I get from ALA with my membership.
We usually take most of the magazines to the local VA hospital for the patients there. But I have no one to take the library magazines and they usually end up going into the recycling bin. I hate that people act as if all magazines are just ephemeral junk to be recycled, or think that they are all available somewhere online.
Since we are both retired and are both readers, we have a lot of time to read [I usually get through the NYT daily and at least one other newspaper.] I’ve always loved the magazine format, but the content has sunk lower and lower as they try to reach readers who really have neither the time nor money for them anymore.