It really is a wonder that any print journalism is able to stay afloat these days. I realized this week that I no longer rush to the mailbox at the beginning of the month to wait for "my magazines". First off, most of my magazines went belly up this year (Country Home, Mary Engelbreit's Home Companion) and the remaining ones have so few pages and so little content that I just breeze through them while standing in front of the racks at Borders.
I grew up in a magazine reading household. My mother kept a big, flat
wicker basket on the second floor hall up against the stairwell and all
our magazines were thrown in there until someone weeded them out and
stacked them on the shelf by the basement where they were handy for
school projects.
That basket was filled with the magazines of the day: Time, Life, Look,
Readers Digest, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, and the occasional Redbook before the cover featured how to have an orgasm a minute. We learned about current events from Time, we were introduced to photojournalism in Life and Look (who would ever forget the photo of John-John saluting JFK's flag-draped coffin on the strong steps of The White House), repeated jokes from Humor in Uniform in Readers Digest, learned ten ways to serve meatloaf in Family Circle, read each spouse's side of the story in Can This Marriage Be Saved (worrying if our parents exhibited any of these symptoms) and learned how to write a short story by reading them over and over in Redbook.
In a houseful of five daughters, there were also plenty of issues of Highlights, American Girl, Seventeen, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and even a few copies of Cosmopolitan that my oldest sister hid from my mother in her dresser.
Every August, we mooned over the back to school issue of Seventeen, wishing we could buy the plaid skirts, woolen crew neck sweaters and Weejun loafers, that were impossibly hot to wear for the first day of school in September.
Do you notice that this girl actually looks "plump"??
When I was a young married and paper was just invented, I discovered a new magazine, Country Living, that set the design standard that coalesced with our obsession with the PBS show, This Old House. Once we found an impossibly out of date and out of the way old house to buy in the woods, we promptly filled it with Sturbridge plaid draperies, turn of the century quarter sawn oak furniture, and a Queen Anne camel back sofa.
I hoarded those issues and spent many a rainy afternoon pulling all of them out and planning what to stencil on the kitchen walls (tulips) and how to decorate The Princess's nursery (Gear Yellow Rubber Duckies). Soon after, I began reading Country Home, Victoria, Mary Engelbreit, and a variety of quilting magazines.
In the mid-90's, we moved to Memphis and my taste morphed from plaid wing chairs to chintz-covered slipper chairs. The calico print camel back sofa sported a new slipcover of blue and white glazed cotton. Soon Traditional Home and House Beautiful began filling my mailbox and I became expert at faux finishing and trompe l'oiel and other French design elements that I half understood.
One day, on one of my almost daily trips to Michael's for some craft supply, I spied a magazine cover with a photo of a wooden box covered with old maps and an "antique letter" created on parchment with rubber stamps and collage. I bought my first edition of Somerset Studio and my little craft world exploded. I was published in the magazine within the year and my life expanded tenfold and now I am a regular contributor to what I consider the premier mixed media art publication, Cloth, Paper, Scissors.
I feel adrift without the regular issues filling my mailbox. I am glad for the issues I've kept over the years and mourn the complete editions of those I trashed on our cross country moves. I've even gone so far as to buy sets of back issues of the original Victoria on Ebay.
Most of my free reading time ( as opposed to reading for work time and reading for pleasure, i.e. novels time) is spent not reading costly magazines, but a long list of blogs filled with gorgeous photography about decorating, remodeling, thrifting, faux finishing, vintage collecting, drapery sewing, garden growing, collage making, studio outfitting, basket weaving, yarn dying, quilt making, book binding, story writing, canvas painting, child rearing, and party throwing blogs.
It's just not the same, though. Sitting on my bed with a cup of tea and a cashmere throw across my legs is just much nicer with a the crinkly papers of a magazine than with a cold, rectangular laptop. It's almost too much, what I can find on the 'net. Printing out photos for a class project just isn't the same as tearing them out of a set of old magazines. And there's no moving, first person end page story to read before I log off for the night.
More importantly, I can't trace my evolution as a person, as a homeowner, as an artist and writer from the Internet. I can't lug out my back issues of a blog and say, look, this is the article that inspired me to make a wedding ring quilt for my sister's wedding, or pull a dog-eared issue of a blog off the shelf to revisit for the first column I read by Jo Northrup in Country Living.
Of course, I am using the internet to write about magazines! Come to think of it, those monthly columns by Jo Northrup in which she wrote about her life in the country were the first thing I read when I got the magazine each month, and inspired me to begin writing about my ordinary life, which led over many years to my blog.And I never would have gotten the column in CPS if I hadn't been on a big, prolific email list for years with one of the editors.
But I'll always prefer paper over plastic, pages over screens, and that is why I will never have a Kindle, no matter how much Mr. Pom swears at me when he lifts my carry-on as we board a plane.
Support a freelancer: go buy a magazine!
