Who remembers? I always found something magical about going to the magazine isle and skimming through the ones I pfft! Didn't have the money for. Look down the isle there's someone sitting on the floor reading a magazine too. Sadly, stores are only a fraction of this volume.
Magazines in the 90s were so incredible, I wish I'd kept some of my favourites.
I still think that magazines are like $3.50 and get irrationally angry when I realize I just paid $10.50-12.00 for a magazine with more ads and less content…
Fuck, magazines in Canada are like $20+ now. I wish I could find one for $10 or $12. I’ve actually started subscribing to some of my favourite magazines just to get the discount. I still feel like a kid again when a new magazine shows up in my mail.
I was in a London Drugs in Calgary last week and was shocked to see a fairly prominent magazine rack. I assumed those were extinct. I never really bought magazines and just waited until my next dentist appointment to read the latest Road and Track / Car and Driver.
I could not believe that magazines cost that much now. Last week I was at Indigo helping my mom buy some "stocking stuffers" for family and she had 6 magazines that we took to the cashier. I swear the woman nearly had a heart attack when the cashier said her total was ~$180 for 6 magazines. She replied "no thank you" and we walked out of the store empty handed.
It used to be $10-12 for a full year subscription.
Depends on the magazine
In most hobby magazines the ads are a fraction of what they used to be pre internet.
So low that not only are the total number of ads down, but the ratio of pages of actual content to pages of ads is up.
Any good examples for folks looking to get back into it? Nat Geo is looking thin, but I'm interested.
Well it was about that time that I noticed that the magazine was about 8 stories tall and a crustacean from the protozoic era
Godammit magazine, get off my lawn
Fear not! You can still get your old magazines back. If you deep dive certain areas of the net allow you to download .PDFs of them. I was able to grab 100s of them even ones I never got to read. It's only been 30 years ago 1996 does not seem that long ago in my mind. Wow!
Yep. The Internet Archive has tons of them. I always try physical if I can, I don’t like reading magazines on my phone or tablet, but sometimes that’s the only option. I wish my kindle could handle magazines though.
Yeah, the scans help to scratch the itch. I was very happy to see lots of fanzines and my favorite anime magazines scanned. Still can't beat the paper originals I still have. I mourned when most anime magazines died around 2003.
I hear ya. I was getting ready to launch an anime and manga magazine around that time. Took years, then right when we started getting into production 2008 hit.
Yeah, that's real bad luck. Mags had been in decline for years but 2008 was the coup de grâce. A real shame since theory/review magazines offered a very curated experience and I think that's one of the reasons anime originally took off: it allowed people to flock to the best stuff available right away which left an impression of quality, since everyone just ignored the absolute garbage that was also produced at the same time. Some YouTubers try to fill this niche but one dude with a camera can't do what a team was capable off and a 50-100 pages magazine offered a lot more space to cover things properly than 5 minutes clips.
There's a Nintendo Power that mentions me by name. Then in the next issue it contains a correction because it used the wrong name.
i had a huge collection of Mecanica Popular (Spanish version for latin America) from the 80s and lost them.
Fast forward and has been able to find only a couple Of those issues.
Was it just a translation or was it a fully seperate/original thing to itself? Because IIRC Popular Mechanics has their entire archive going back to 1905 accessible online.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Popular_Mechanics.html?id=49gDAAAAMBAJ
I collected Spanish anime magazines and still have a huge collection of the Mexican edition of Muy Interesante (more or less all issues between 1990 and 2001). Occupies a lot of space and I'm thinking of maybe bind them all together in one year tomes to make reading easier. I love the old stuff just before Internet was really a thing and journos used to call it the "information superhighway". Has a nice retro feeling now and is amusing to read the predictions that they got right and the stuff that turned out to be ludicrous 😆 I also read Conozca Más, Discover, Newton, interestingly I have very few Nat Geo even though those magazines were far easier to get. Also I have quite a lot, like a lot, of that Spanish Magazine Año Zero, I used to like a lot reading about, UFOs and conspiracy theories... that didn't aged well 😂
Libby and other online libraries still have older issues of magazines. It’s not the same feeling as flipping through a physical copy, but I’ll take it over them being completely lost.
My mom got me a five year subscription to rolling stone back then. It was awesome.
I can smell and feel a 90s era rolling stone so vividly now.
The particular cover indelibly etched in my brain is Sarah Michelle Gellar in a Vampirella-like costume. Not just for the obvious reasons, but because I was irrationally embarrassed to buy it.
I remember handing it face down to the old lady at the counter. When she turned it over and saw the cover, she gave me this purse-lipped glare like I was a perv or reprobate or something.
Good times. There are some aspects of being young I do not miss at all.
e: hell ya
I lived for those Nintendo Power comics
I fortunately did :) perfect wc material
I loved them as a teen!
I only have one, and that's the Terminator edition of ACE magazine.
I do miss 90s mags, they where so much fun and the free cds where cool at the time.
Now sadly they cant keep up to date like the internet.
https://archive.org/details/magazine_rack
I sometimes see like a Time or Rolling Stone special and its like $25 and I’m like WTF??!
I was a a massive redneck (still am) so I had my 4-wheele, off-road, hunting magazines and I wish I still had them in the physical
But my favorite as a young kid was “looking” at whatever magazines were remotely close to the risqué mags
Electronic Gaming Monthly
YES! VIDEO GAME MAGAZINES!!!
My friends all had consoles and EGM subscriptions, and I the lone PC Gamer subscriber among them...
Used to have a subscription to GamePro. Loved that magazine
with demo discs!
Wolfenstein 3D demo. Rise of the Triad.
God I miss video game magazines. So. Bad.
There are still some good ones. Game Informer is back. Edge is really good. Retro Gamer fills that niche area.
Nice!
Nintendo Power? 😬
nothin' beats the OG thrill of crackin' open a fresh mag back in the day.
Getting them delivered once a month was awesome as well. It's magazine day mom!
NUDIE MAGAZINE DAY! NUDIE MAGAZINE DAY!
Man, I had a subscription to high society back in the late 90's when I was like 16 or whatever. Got my issues for like half the year - then they stopped. Wrote them for a response. Turns out my dad's psychotic, chickenhead girlfriend tipped them off that I was underage...fuck her..
As I gamer they just brought back Game Informer, you can still get that one in the mail!
THE SMELL, MAN!!!
Remember if you subscribed? When they came in the mail they would place that SUPER ADHESIVE mailing label on the cover ruining it! It could not be peeled off! They began listening to our complaints and instead printed the mailer lable on the over blotting out 1/4 of the cover... It's funny now but I remember people being pissed over this! Ha ha ha ha!!!
I still get Thrasher mag - your first annual sub comes with a free t-shirt that costs as much as the entire subscription. The following year doesn't come with a shirt but the price is nearly halved. I feel like I am paying about $4 an issue.
Man this takes me back. Haven’t thought of this in years. Still remember being so amped when I’d get home from school and a new Transworld would greet me in the mailbox.
Also did you see Joslin’s part today?? 3 flip el toro?? 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
Hell yeah man! That tre flip was pure history, unbelievable. I never had a Transworld sub, but had one for Skateboarding mag.
heck yah
When I went to the grocery store with my mom, I would always go straight to that aisle and look for the latest issues of MAD and Cracked.
I was just in Walgreens, saw a Mad magazine and thought about buying it. Looked at the price, $15.99.
I ain't paying $16 for a magazine, damn.
[Not] Cheap!
And really, they're nothing but reprints of older stuff.
I just got my MAD magazine issue in the mail today! I got a subscription earlier this year when I saw it was only like, $20 for the year.
And 90%+ of it will be rehashed content.
Same but Archie comics right at checkout
They ended the archie comic digests this year sadly.
Damn, that was like the last holdout of comics in grocery stores
I still see the double digests at the checkout.
That was always the first place I went to in a grocery store!
Ahh, core memory unlocked. I remember back in the late 90s riding on a Greyhound bus from Chicago back home to NYC and buying a MAD magazine at one of the pit stops. Since it was a “red-eye” trip, all the lights were off in the bus. When I turned my overhead light on, after about 20 mins of reading, a very large man sitting behind me gently tapped my shoulder and asked “is that the new MAD issue?” I said with a smile “yes!” He then says “I’m sure that sh*t is funny as hell, but imma need you to turn off that light so I can sleep.” 😂
For me, it was Tips N Tricks, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Nintendo Power, and Wizard magazines that I beelined for
My proudest accomplishment as a 12-year-old kid was getting one of my questions published in a Tips N Tricks Mailbag post. I wish I could find that magazine but it got lost to time
Sheesh, I miss this. There used to be like 8-9 video game mags a month. Seemed like everything had an entire industry of magazines to cover it. 10-12 pro wrestling magazines... Then the comic books ....you used to be able to buy comics at....well, any place that sold anything, sold comics. Grocery store, convenience store, movie theaters.... EVERY place had comics
That and the video game section with a controller and console set up so you could play was the best!
It was always the gaming magazines for me. Needed the cheat codes and walkthroughs sometimes.
Dude I had to find 4 magazines for 10-17 year olds to make collages. The only magazines I could find were time retrospectives of golden girls, wizard of oz and Elvis.
Ha ha ha!!!
Nothing better than coming home from a long day of middle school to a fresh Nintendo power or game informer. Reading in depth articles about games you would never play lol.
Not true! We got emulators now, BOY! We just didn't this know back then... Or how about being grounded? My parents too my games, my TV out of my room but not my gaming magazines! That helped me a little...
Nights when nothing was going on, going into a Barnes & Noble and looking at car magazines for an hour or so was amazing. Plus they had the Euro magazines that (at that time) were hard to get.
Or, at home if you were super bored, pull out you archive of magazines and have you a marathon with some snacks. To me there was nothing like it.
Weirdly enough, this is still an option. Thanks to Barnes and Nobles diversification into random bullshit, they're still able to afford to have a fairly well furnished magazine aisle at most location.
Bro, this can literally be a Barnes and Noble today.
The prices of magazines are ridiculous now. I picked one up for the first time in ages at Barnes & Noble and it was 15 bucks! More than some of the books!
It boggles the mind what they do with all those magazines that don't sell and "expire" in a month.
At B&N now, just go buy an overpriced cup of coffee and you can sit in the cafe and read all the magazines from their shelves you want.
Buying individual magazines has always been expensive. Even back in the day, buying magazines off the rack was pricey. The cost conscious way has always been subscriptions.
This sent me down a little search to see.
The only magazine I could quickly think of was Car and Driver, which cost $3.50 in '98, which is about $7 now. Buying a new one off the rack is about $8.
So a little more spendy, but not by much
Any good magazine back in the day cost a decent amount. I worked at a borders and one I hate everyone that sat on the floor and read them and never put them back, close to 90% of people. Two the cheap magazines were 60% ads.
There's a 2021 tool guide in there. This pic is like 5 years old at best.
I actually went to a Barnes and Noble a couple of weeks ago and had a blast perusing the magazines. Hadn't done that in a long while.
Loved taking like 6 on vacation. such a treat.
Just hope the sun didn't go down if you had a long drive and then you couldn't read them in the dark. Ha ha!
When they were stacked on the display stand I always made sure to grab one from the "middle" if I bought it... Fresh and no greasy ass thumbprints on the cover or bent pages! 😁
I grew up on MAD Magazine, and later was published in it. When I used to teach kids art classes ten years ago and I'd tell them I was in MAD, there'd usually be a few who knew it and were impressed. Now a days few have even heard of magazines, let alone MAD.
35¢ Cheap
I think they were $1.99 in my day.... still Cheap
I wanted to grow up and become the person that designed the inside of the magazine articles
Well, we grew up and... I draw comic books and in my art books I format them to how the magazines looked back then and people love reading them. That's as close as I will get to that.
What do you do now?
graphic design and web/marketing. 🙂 so it's a similar field but I just never fell into a desktop publishing position where I'd be making layouts like that.
maybe for the best, I dabbled with a magazine assignment in college and it's a lot of work. bless the magazine designers. and back then they had to do it by hand!!
That’s awesome!
That term brings me back. Is it even a thing anymore?
This was the internet for us
I used to buy those Maxim magazines when I was younger
Maxim, Stuff and FHM were saviours on the long nightshifts.
I really enjoyed the stupid/funny captions of For Him Magazine.
I remember an article about a dog accidentally shooting his owner, the picture was a puppy with a gun in his mouth and the caption "nobody puts baby in a corner"
I still have few issues from the early 2010s.
YES! MAXIM!!! I was randomly looking for an issue at a Barnes and Noble out of turrets and remembered. "Yeah, them being stocked here is so 10 years ago."
The last time I bought one was around 2014
Xtina '03 😍
I had the hots for her during the 2000s
One thing I remember is how long it took to absorb every inch of an issue. I'd go back and try to squeeze every last drop of content out. These days I'm refreshing reddit over and over :(
Nintendo Power and Xbox magazine…
My favorite thing as a teen was getting a bunch of magazines before a vacation to read.
There’s a kids magazine on the table right now, that cost $17.95 for that single issue. Might as well buy a whole book, and with no adverts in it!
But yes, I loved fashion magazines as a teenager! Pretty sure I read them all.
"I'll be at the magazines while you guys do your grocery shopping."
Price guides. I miss my sportscard price guides the most.
When I was a kid I used to spend $2.50 on the Beckett Baseball Card Price Guide so I could see if my $0.35 Jose Canseco card went up by a penny.
Edit: hey! It’s up to $2 today. My childhood self would be so disappointed. I was sure I was gonna be able to retire on this card.
We would play poker for cards. We used Becketts to make sure nobody was getting screwed.
Someone lost a Nolan Ryan 5k gold card in a hand so rules had to be implemented.
Beckett is still publishing half a dozen of them every single month . . . just re-subscribe!
$3.99 - $7.99 back then. Now $9.99 - $14.99. Years ago when I saw the $7.99 I thought that was ABSURD!
WWE Divas😩
Paintball magazines got me through so many boring situations in the early 2000s
It wasn’t that long ago that Walmart had a magazine aisle that looked like this. I’d browse through it every time I’d go and used to buy a ton of magazines.
I miss the smell
God I loved magazines
A shame magazines are full of stupid ads here in my country nowadays.
Mad magazine, game informer, Nintendo power, and wizard were some of my favorites as a kid/teen.
Hoopla and Libby offer digital magazines with a library subscription. The library also carries physical copies in you prefer paper
I used to love reading BMX mags, gaming mags, bass guitar mag - they are all gone - only the car mags have somewhat survived - and most of them are quarterly and expensive (shout out to the Road Rat, Octane and Rodders Journal)
In Britain, it's a big tradition to always buy the Christmas edition of the Radio Times and highlight all the shows we want to watch every year
Who else hid playboys under their mattress LOL
Man, the act of walking to the local grocery store in my teens with a few dollars in my pocket to pick up the newest issue of Guitar World. What a time.
Its like I fell asleep and when I woke up, everthing had changed.
I wish we collectively had the same patience to enjoy a magazine. Today our mind's inquiries are solved by immediate Google searches or Chat GPT prompts. We used to open some investigative journalism, an interview, or a how-to in a magazine with curiosity and patience. We came back to the article. We highlighted portions. We took notes. We cut pages out or shared the piece with friends. Some of us drilled through the reading with hungry eagerness. Others read it in sections as time allowed like when we had to sit on the toilet. I miss the speed of life that enable magazines to have genuine value and surprise for us.
Entertainment Weekly was amazing back in the 90s!
I remember…Redbook, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, some weird ones called Kiss and Darling (which I ABSOLUTELY lived for), Seventeen….now I get People and Guideposts and Reader’s Digest. Old people magazines! 😄
*aisle
Ah yes, my oasis of sanity whenever my parents dragged me along on their grocery runs.
Especially at truck stops!
What you have to appreciate about the magazine era is the amount of work that went into each issue. It was a huge staff of writers, designers, ad salespeople, researchers, photographers, etc. And you had to really research and edit before taking things to print. Nowadays there’s typos everywhere because there’s no editors. It’s not worth hiring an editor for something that’s just digital click bait of the day. And the photo shoots and covers were a work of art in their own right.
I still go to my local library to check out magazines.
Man, I remember it wasn't hard to lose 30-60 minutes just browsing the magazine aisle.
If you had a Hastings in your hometown, raise your hand 🙋♂️
Britney on the phone, holding a teletubby... 😜😇
Miss them a lot
Game Informer, Lowrider & The Source were my go to when going to Walmart with my parents.
Used to get the demo disc off gaming magazines in wh smith at lunch break from school.
Remember bringing the gaming magazine to school the next day and every kid flocked to you asking to check it out?
same!
had to be sneaky
Spent many hours in that isle. Very cool they let us look at them without buying, looking back at it.
"This is not a library!" Aha ha ha ha!!!
"Hey, this isn't a library! Buy something, or get out!"
Damn I really forgot about this. I didn’t even realize it ever went away. That’s crazy to think one fateful day none of these existed and I don’t think I ever gave it thought til now. Lol
I know man... I know... One day I fear they may completely be gone heck! Best Buy no longer sells DVDs/Blu-rays...
Yeah, good old days when you had to take a flight to somewhere, before in-flight entertainment and smartphones ever existed, and when laptop could only last 20 minutes on battery, you’d get into these magazines shop and purchase a few, have a good time, in your mind - something I miss!
Pfft! I just brought mine with me! Screw the airports over price gouging! Not to mention if the person next to you shared an interest in what you were reading, this made you exchange names and have a blast with this stranger!
I would always go straight to the magazine section when I went grocery with my parents. Magazines were so fun up until the late 2000s.
I don't know how anybody could read a modern magazine. You're paying to read 99% ads
I loved old computer magazines that came with floppies full of shareware programs to try out, it was so exciting because everything wasn’t so established yet. What’s gonna be on the disk? A game? A file manager that resembles fishing? It’s an adventure!
Grabbing a magazine and cutting out your favorite band pics or just a cool pic of something you liked and taping it up on your wall in your room or in your locker at school was the tits.
80s: RUN, Compute!'s Gazette (both Commodore magazines).
Radio Electronics, and similar, and what it merged with.
Computer Shopper, and Boot (later to become Maximum PC). And all the included CDs.
Yes, Mad/Cracked, all the Archie and Casper digests. Way back, Sgt Rock (I think it was), and this digest of Sci-Fi stories.
City News in Chicago on N Cicero. You won’t be disappointed.
I remember going through a catalog of all the different types of magazines that were out there. I found so many that were really cool/niche magazines.
I loved standing at the racks of my local bookstore--again, found a bunch of cool magazines.
Heavy Metal magazines for me. Hit Parader, Circus, RIP, Kerrang, Metal Hammer, Creem Metal, Power Metal, etc. Fun times. 🤘
Creem was my absolute favorite
There was regular Creem and then they put out Creem Metal, focusing solely on Metal. Regular was good, but I preferred Metal. 🤘
My first job out of college was writing for a music magazine and I LOVED walking up to a newsstand, opening up the latest issue, and seeing my work in there.
Now I want a snapple
I go to Barnes and Noble, grab a magazine off the rack and read in their cafe all the time. lol
Comic books
I was a magazine publisher for 20 years. I published my last pub 2022 and shut it all down but the electronic side. It was an absolute blast of a business to own and operate. It was hugely lucrative and just plain fun. I don’t really miss it though. Living deadline to deadline sucks, printers are sharks and distributors are difficult and expensive. I didn’t enjoy electronic publishing. It was boring. It lacked the chaos of publishing. I sold that part of the business off last year.
I was a Guitar World Magazine addict. Had every issue for years and years. My mom loved it because she could shop without me being a pest lol
They were. Two big changes in the whole industry:
During the 1960s, roughly, it became cheaper to advertise on TV than to advertise in a magazine, and advertisers could reach just as many, or more, people, so the "General Interest" magazines like "Life" and "Saturday Evening Post" died off. A side effect of this was that "Special Interest" magazines - "Fine Wood Working" for example - plus one or two devoted to every hobby, activity and interest known to Americans, sprouted up like mushrooms. For really popular interests - guns spring to mind - you could find a dozen magazines. (Pun intended.)
The second change started about 20 years ago, when the Internet killed off an awful lot of magazines, and, while it was at it, newspapers.
My mom got a part time job at Barnes and Noble in 95. At the end of every month see was in charge of send back the magazines that hadn’t sold. She had to tear off the covers and send those back. Buuuutt than all the mags got thrown away or taken by employees. So every month for three years while I was in high school my mom would bring me home around 30/40 magazines! I felt like a millionaire. All the gaming mags, car mags, movie, maxim, fhm, all the euro movie mags that I could never afford. It was some of the best times!
Idk if anyone is interested but I have a magazine 😅 www.Sunshineandfriends.art. We just want to promote positivity and community through art, mental wellness, and supporting local businesses. Thank you for indulging my shameless self promotion 🫶🥹 We’re about to publish our third issue hopefully Monday! We have physical copies but I think most people have been finding us online rn :)
I always looked forward to when my zoobook came in the mail.
I used to save and save to buy the yearly "World Cars" edition of the Daily Mail and Daily Express. Hi-Fi and Record Review was way out of my budget. Same with Car and Driver.
I was doing Shopkick and had to scan magazines at Walmart and it was insane their lack of selection. Really sad
Teen Tribute was great with info on the latest Harry potter movies.
I like to buy a magazine in the airport before a long flight and then read through it cover to cover. It feel so good.
Never cared for magazines much, expensive and just filled with adverts and then only two articles worth reading. I did like the PlayStation magazine back in the 90s that came with demo discs though 😂
I loved them! My favorite aisle. Now there are between 12.99 and 19.99 each and for a small amount of pages. Sigh. The good old days indeed.
Sassy was always my favorite. Awesome teen magazine.
Kinda miss the fact that a magazine was only so long.
The closet in my bathroom is filled with hundreds of magazines from the 80's through the 2000's. EGM, Computer Gaming World, Computer Games Strategy Plus, Electronic Games, PSM, Dreamcast Magazine, Game Informer, PC Gamer, Compute!, PC Accelerator, GamePro, Next Generation...so much classic goodness. I read them on the toilet. Never get tired of them.
EXACTLY!!!
I'll file this under stuff that's still exists. There's a huge magazine rack at Barnes & Noble and other bookstores.
I miss my magazines!! 😭
Magazine… Diet Coke…. Packet of salt and vinegar chips.
Hey , you in the wheelchair, you better not be jacking off to the anime comics!!
as a teenage girl i always got my monthly subscription of dolly and girlfriend magazines.also smash hits and tv hits.
Magazines still exist, but many are gone, and many others a shadow of their former selves.
I was a serious reader of Guitar World, GuitarOne, Metal Edge, Entertainment Weekly, and Cinescape. Some of my other favs were Electronic Gaming Monthly, GamePro, Wizard, the occasional Men's Fitness, Maxim, and Playboy lol.
I get why magazines have fallen out of favor and died off. It's hard to compete against the internet's cheap and instant power. But so many of the things online are just trash. Articles grinded out to (or AI generated) to meet daily quotas and farm clicks. I do truly miss the monthly curated nature of a magazine these days.
I miss scoping out the latest tips n tricks and Nintendo Power magazines.
They’re still at Barnes and Noble.
Yes you are correct! Back in the day you had that main section the Banes and Noble had plus 5 more magazine racks in front of it!
Magazines still exist ya know…
Ummm... Of course they do. I mentioned stores don't carry them in such a volume like they used to was what I said. Have you seen Walmarts magazine section? It's bleepin' tiny now!
lol have you checked a price tag on one recently?
Yeah….and how many people buy them?
….and where do they buy them?
How many people do you see reading a magazine on any given day?
….who are these magazine people?
This is from 4 years ago
Fee free action of the volume, double the ads and triple the price. My mom used to buy two or three every week when we went shopping.
90's me would go to the video game section and copy down ALOT of cheat codes from Tips and Tricks.
I also remember specifically writing down every single Fatality from MK3.
I still get nat geo and golf digest magazines. You can still order them
Good Ol Magazine Isle.
Back in the ‘90s when we had video game magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly and Tips and Tricks. I also remember Inquest Gamer magazine, which focused on trading card games. Inquest would always come in sealed bags because they’d include free cards, often Magic cards, and I’d always find those bags torn open and the cards taken.
My city’s last magazine shop didn’t survive Covid. Could get F&SF, the old MLB stats book, writer’s digest and three different jazz magazines there. Then one day during Covid the shelves disappeared.