Failed magazines

Sometimes, a one-year magazine subscription lasts a lifetime. I am pretty sure I am the only person in the country, libraries included, who owns every issue of Brill's Content and Talk. The former was a high-profile media watchdog magazine that launched in 1999, i.e., just when people started watching the media less and less. The latter launched the
same year, just when people were giving up talking to each other in favor of IMing. Neither lasted three years. I love failed magazines.

Actually, I love magazines in general so much so that I hate to throw them out. Which is why I love failed magazines best. If I got permanently attached to the New Yorker or Entertainment Weekly, I would be soon be sleeping on piles of old David Denby movie reviews, and that doesn't sound very restful, does it? As it is, my one-bedroom apartment contains at least 2000 magazines (and a similar number of books). A few hundred of them are issues from magazines that are still living, but the bulk are from titles like P.O.V., Icon Thoughtstyle, Gear, Gene Simmons' Tongue, etc.

Which isn't to say I don't read Time, Esquire, GQ, etc. I do. But I don't feel quite as compelled to save those issues, because I figure hundreds of thousands of other people are reading them too, so they won't be forgotten too soon. But these others, the ones that come in go in three years or less, and sometimes in a single issue? Someone should honor the memory of Milton, Milton Berle's attempt at a lifestyle magazine (tagline: We smoke, we drink, we gamble.), right? And that someone is me.

It is a problem though. For one thing, my apartment smells like old magazines. For another thing, even though the fact that I mostly save failed magazines only, there are a lot of failed magazines. They might only last a few issues, but they add up. Whenever I need a broom or a step-ladder, I have to borrow them from my neighbor, because my hall closet where I should keep useful household tools is filled with old yellowing issues of Memories ("The Magazine of Then and Now.")

Last year, Goodwill got a half-dozen pairs of pretty good shoes and a similar number of sweaters from me, because I decided the garment boxes beneath my bed would be a good place to store all my old issues of Revolution and Fame.

There is something extremely oppressive about being surrounded, no, bunkered, no, imprisoned by thousands and thousands of pages of someone's failed dreams. It takes a lot of people to create a magazine (editors, writers, photographers, ad sales people) and while they may not have been talented and ambitious enough to succeed, they were at least more talented and ambitious than me. After all, I've never managed to create even a failed magazine. Essentially, then, I have surrounded, no, bunkered, no, imprisoned myself with a very defeating message even people who are more talented and ambitious than me fail more often than they succeed, so what chance do I have?
I do fantasize about getting rid of them. Selling them on Ebay would be too mcuh work, especially since the market for magazines no one wanted in the first place is, except for a few exceptions, not particularly robust. (I do imagine, though, that I get a tidy sum for the Summer 1987 issue of Arrival, which contains the first short story David Foster Wallace ever published.) For the most part, it would probably make the most sense just to dump them in the recycling bin. I might lose out on a few bucks, but in a matter of minutes, a huge burden, a burden that has gradually gotten bigger and bigger and more oppressively depressing over the years, would be lifted off my back. But really, what would be the point? As soon as I had the space, I'd just start filling it up again. After all, odds are Mob Candy and GOOD won't last forever, and someone's got to bear witness, don't they?