I think everyone hates the postcards that are stuffed into magazines. Fallout (the kind that are loose rather than being attached in some way) is the worst, but makes for easy de-boning - you just shake the magazine by its spine and you get most of them.
Attached cards are much more of an annoyance since even when you rip them out, it’s hard to get the stub and so it still acts as a bookmark for whatever page it’s on.
So how to you handle it?
I’ve never bought a magazine in my life but I do get a lot of free ones.
Before even looking at the table of contents I rip out not only the cards and annoying thick ads but also every page that has nothing but ads on both sides. Cuts the volume down about 30 percent, and then I have a brochure that may actually be worth reading.
Yes, I always got rid of the excess paper. Womens magazines had perfume samples that were bad for my asthma, they definitely had to go.
I tear them all out, they have a tendency to flip the pages when I’m not careful and I hate loosing my place. I also used to tear out pages that are all advertisements even if they aren’t the stiff paper kind; a habit gained when I saved magazines for later re-reading. Besides hating advertisements on principle, that made the magazines a lot slimmer for storage.
I used to read a lot of magazines, and I used to debone them. Now I have a Kindle and I buy almost no dead-tree editions. If i am any indication, the magazine business is changing.
I just get one magazine and it has loose cards in two separate sections. I gather them up and use them as bookmarks.
Occasionally they have those thick ads that are attached in the spine but I just deal with it.
They have to go, every last one of them.
I remove the ones that are stapled in…loose ones become bookmarks.
And that includes the stapled in ones once they’re no longer stapled in.
I get every last card out that I can, and then use them as bookmarks. However, I don’t subscribe to anything right now and I buy magazines only occasionally so it hasn’t been a major issue for me lately.
I’ve often suspected that the primary intention in inserting all these cards is to make it difficult for somebody to stand in the news section of a store and read an article without paying for the magazine. I suspect it’s for the same reason that it seems you can never find out what page the cover story is on, and that many pages don’t have numbers on them.
It so happens that I worked for a year at a magazine distribution company, before the division folded and we were all let go. While I was working there I had always meant to find out if the cards actually are intended to discourage newsstand freeloading, but never got around to asking someone.
If we took the bones out, they wouldn’t be crunchy.
Just the loose stuff. If it’s attached it doesn’t usually bother me.
Years ago I did a brief stint in a bookstore. One day some guy came up to the register tearing pages out of a magazine. Ads and articles he wasn’t interested in reading. Then he wanted a discount because it wasn’t the full magazine.
I usually use the fallout for bookmarks. I remove the stiff cards, too.
My parents insist on giving me a Reader’s Digest subscription every year for Xmas, I don’t have any other magazine subscriptions, and generally I read magazines at the library (where the fallout has usually already fallen out, and I don’t feel comfortable removing the attached cards). I used to save the RD, so I’d remove the pages and pages of ads (and make the magazine about 30% slimmer), but these days I just recycle any issues that I get after I read them. I generally toss the latest issue in my purse for those times when I’m out of better reading.
Any of my magazines that appear with perfume samples, I immediately contact the publisher and tell them to send me fragrance-free copies from now on. It will take a couple of months to catch up with the subscription, but they are willing to do it. In Style is the worst offender, but they also were quite compliant. No perfume? No problem!
+1 - my nightstand drawer must have a steady supply of halved New Yorker and Guitar mag postcards in it at all times for bookmarks…
Great Pallas, who has time for that?
Read the bits you want, ignore the rest, and put it in the recycle bin when done, I say.
I also get Readers Digest thanks to Mom =)
When I get done with them I either drop them off at the base hospital for people stuck waiting to read, or I mail them off to a friend of mine who is an english as a second language private tutor to use with his students.
I fully de-bone. This means removing all subscription cards, perfume samples, foldout ads, anything that’s made from different paper than the rest of the magazine. Often this leaves me with a magazine that’s only about 7 pages.
If anyone cares, what you’re calling “fall outs” are actually called “blow ins.” (For how they get inserted.)
This was your useless factoid of the day.
I rarely am the original owner of the magazine. Either the magazine belongs to someone else, and I don’t want to deface their propery, or I got it from someone who already deboned them.
I have torn out ads before in the latter instance, but I always wind up tearing something else, so I stopped. But I will doodle on them when I’m bored.
Crap, I wanted to be first with that tidbit (Ms. Malienation, a graphic artist, informed me of this years ago). Me, I debone my issue of The Week the minute I get it.
BTW, ever seen the floor around the magazine section in a Border’s or Barnes & Noble? Those damn things are everywhere…