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Wednesday, 14 August 2013

Magazine recirculation - life after the newsstand


From the New York Times, Mar 22, 1936:
 
OLD MAGAZINES TRAVEL WIDELY
 
FOR many an old magazine the wastebasket is not, by any means, the end of the trail. Janitors and waste-paper dealers conspire to salvage an amazing proportion of all printed matter not given directly to welfare organizations.

Once reclaimed, periodicals are classified and sold at a price that runs from 35 cents to $4 a hundred pounds; or, by the piece, at 15 cents for the deluxe type and about a quarter of a cent for most of the others.

In the second-hand market pulp magazines make up for the earlier stepchild phase of their existence by taking ascendancy, in at least one respect, over quality-group and popular-group publications. They are the real nomads of the print world; one dealer annually ships a vast quantity to England, whence they journey to the various British colonies.

Next to them in demand are the quality magazines. The popular group rates third and the weeklies a bad fourth.

2 comments:

  1. Every now and then these pulp magazines return from their long journey to the British colonies.
    A few years ago I was high bidder on 3 issues of DIME DETECTIVE from the 1930's. They finally arrived from Australia where I saw that they were US editions that had somehow found their way to Australia where they had all the stampings and markings of a lending library. Decades later, they returned home in tattered but readable shape. I still have them.

    Welcome Home.

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    Replies
    1. I have a few myself that made the trip from the US to Britain, and now they're in India. I have a feeling that they will travel some more.

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