Renew Now For The Best Price! You May Already Be A Winner!

Most of my life I have been having a love affair with magazines. It began with my parent's subscription to Life, at the time a weekly that arrived on Wednesdays. I loved Wednesday afternoon, when I would get home from school & get to the mail first (it still makes me uneasy to have someone look at one of my magazines before I do).

When I was 8 years old, my Aunt Sharon gave me a gift of a year of The New Yorker. She did this every Christmas until she died in the early 1970s.The tradition then passed to her sister, my mother. Can you imagine... I have received 50 issues of the New Yorker a year for 50 years! My parents gave me a gift subscription to Variety at the same age. I was 8 years old & read & studied the weekly grosses of motion pictures & Broadway plays.

At the very height of magazine-aloopa, I was receiving 25+ periodicals a month (this didn't include catalogues, which I treated as magazines), often with my mail carrier unhappy with me. Now magazines are archaic, soon to go the way of analog & VHS & traditional marriage.

I receive some periodicals because a favorite was given a funeral & the publishers fulfilled a subscription with a replacement, which is why get something titled LUXE in the mail 6 times a year, as if it makes up for the loss of Metropolitan Home, which I had been reading since it was Apartment Life in the late 1970s.

Now, in the middle of the Great Recession, I have pared down. In 2012, Post Apocalyptic Bohemia is delivered the following from the USPS:
Elle Home
Dwell
House Beautiful
Veranda
Vanity Fair
The New Yorker
New York
Portland Home
Portland Monthly
Sunset
Entertainment Weekly
Details
Out
The Advocate
Country Living
Interior Design
Architectural Digest
World Of Interiors

Long lost & lamented: Upper & Lower Case, The Face, House & Garden, Home, Communication Arts, Spy, Christopher Street & my beloved- After Dark.

I have a blood draw every week to monitor a medicine I take. My friendly clinic has a dearth of reading material with 100s of copies of Web MD & The Asian Journal as the only choices. Thankfully, I almost always have a book with me, but being magnanimous, I inquired at the desk, manned by a handsome man lucky enough to have the name- Fernando Lamas, wondering if the clinic would wish me to bring in already read magazines. I asked if there were subject matters that were forbidden & I was assured that I could donate whatever I felt I was able to part with. I believe Fernando was hoping my collection would include 5 years of back issues of Inches.

I brought in copies of my monthly, biweekly, monthly & quarterly rags, with my address carefully cut out. Who needs a stalker or an identity lifter? Proud of my unselfishness, I arranged them around the waiting area in perfect stacks by subject matter, spines faced to the reader.

A week later the clinic was bare of anything to peruse outside of Web MD, The Asian Journal, one dirty & tired Martha Stewart Living Easter issue & a 1991 Field & Stream. Was it alarming that fellow patients were offended by my reading materials or was I to be thrilled that the masses took them home thinking that they had hit the periodical jack pot?