magazines

I used to have a problem with magazines. I used to have this crazy love for them. I can remember going to visit my friend Marti, we were probably in third grade, and spotting piles of People magazines on her couch and practically salivating at the sight of them. My mom never bought People. I remember wanting nothing more than to just plop myself down on that couch and start browsing, but even at that tender age I’d learned that it was unacceptable to go over to a friend’s house to play Barbies and sprawl out on the floor to flip through a pile of old Cosmopolitans instead.

As a teenager I started saving (hoarding) mags with my first subscription (Seventeen, of course) and just never stopped. By the time I finished grad school in 1994 and prepared to move back to the Midwest from Arizona, I realized that it was just too ridiculous to cart that collection back across the country. But I wasn't ready to just ditch them wholesale, mind you. Impossible! Instead, I carefully x-acto-ed out all the most important pages, 3-hole punched those pages and loaded them into binders. Perfect! Well, sort of. Packing to move from Chicago to Brooklyn in 2009, I started loading the binders into boxes and realized that I had somehow amassed 23 very fat binders. And that each box, containing perhaps 4 binders each, weighed several billion tons. There was no choice. I needed to cull. Funny thing though, even the stuff I had first saved from 1994 still looked good to me. I hadn't tired of or outgrown it. At least my interests/tastes have remained fairly consistent over the years, I guess? Regardless, I managed (somehow, painfully) to winnow my collection down to the 9 binders that now fit neatly on my bookshelves.

Bouwerie Iconic

Anyway, over the past couple years I've stopped buying magazines entirely. I'm not sure what happened, really. They just stopped seeming so alluring. It might be that I finally hit some saturation point, because not even the Bouwerie Iconic could lure me inside, but more likely it's because of the internet. I have pages and pages of flickr images "favorited" (3,727 in fact), long bookmarked lists of blogs that serve as sources of visual inspiration, and just this past year I've been sucked into pinterest in a big way. Makes me wonder if digital hoarding is a thing. I'm totally going to google that.