What do you do with your magazines?

[ironhat]

I've accumulated a lot of magazines and realized that the better part of each one is not necessarily something that I need or want. So, like my firearms magazines, I've been pulling out the articles and projects of interest and filing them in folders by category. So, what do you all do with yours?

[Duff]

Piles here. . . piles there. . . few in the car, medium stack near the toilet. . .

[leehljp]

I put some of them (mostly FW) in boxes, but not "yearly" in an organized way. Most other WW mags, I throw away about every 5 or 6 years after building up a couple of rows on a book shelf.

If I don't refer back to a magazine after 5 or 6 years, they are gone, except for FW.

[jhart]

I have some piles of them on my desk and go back through them and pull out any articles, put them in plastic inserts and then file them in a few looseleaf binders labeled for various catagories. Then throw out the remains. For ShopeNotes, they are kept intact in their own binders.
Reminds me, the stack is pretty high, need to go through them again!!

[twistsol]

I use the Corporal Klinger method, "A pile for everything and everything in its pile."

[dkerfoot]

When I was first getting started, I bought someone else's piles off of ebay!

[pelligrini]

Piles of recent mags, a couple piles of ones with articles to be used. The rest go in a bunch of cardboard magazine shelf boxes, grouped by magazine & year stuffing the box full.

[Richard in Smithville]

I like to leave them in different places around the house. That way I always have something to look at no matter where I am at home.

[Russianwolf]

I seem to contantly reread them until I could likely quote the entire magazine. I'm always finding tid-bits of useful info hidden in the lines.

Once I think I've finished rereading one, it goes in the shop library until I decide to thumb through it again.

[dlminehart]

I have started using a "process". Keep the mags for a few months, then cut out the articles or tips of interest and accumulate a pile of these for a few months. Then, run them through my multifunction printer/fax/scanner, which has an autofeed scanner that makes a sequentially-numbered PDF file of each page. I then go through the folder of PDFs, sorting them into folders by magazine. I've gotten this far with about 4 years of magazines.

Next steps: The PDFs for each article will be grouped into single files. All files, whether of single pages or multi-page articles will be renamed with mag abbreviation, issue, and page number as the filename. They will then go into a Portfolio database, with some keywords attached. One keyword will be from a list of document types, e.g. "Tips", "Plans", etc. Then, more specifics, e.g., "Painting", "Sacrificial Fence", etc. Result will be a searchable database of magazine pages.

[Mr__Bill]

Save up a years worth, then donate to your local library, then keep up the donations every few months. Others can then read them and they are stored in a nice environment and easy to find when you want to reference something.

Donate to a home for the elderly. Someday you can re-read them there.


Bill, on the Sunny Oregon Coast

[ironhat]

David, I just may have to hate you! That's so organized that my head hurts!!

[Alex Franke]

Mostly random piles and baskets. The stuff with no shelf life usually goes into magazine racks by year. Older racks are recycled after the content is stale. Woodworking mags last a few years unless they're real keepers because of plans or key articles. Computer mags, programming, or Science News never really make it to the racks at all. NatGeo lasts forever.

[Lance]

I was using the industry-standard pile method until the wife started asking “when are you going to start tossing these?". Since a response like "never" translates to "whenever you want, honey" , I started to attempt a clipping plan to save the most useful stuff. I can now confirm: ain't going to happen! I'm just not disciplined/anal enough to stay on top of it, especially I end up wanting to clip & keep 80% of the articles.

I do have a "better plan", though. I'm going electronic with all my subscriptions. I can then save files I like quickly in my own organization, so I can find it when I need it.

I credit my membership here with this idea. There are so many useful posts, and eventually old posts become hard to re-find, so I started "printing" articles/posts/etc. to PDF format. (I have a utility for this from my work, but I think you can buy it from Adobe, or get freeware/shareware off the net.) I now have a nice little folder structure that categorizes almost anything I might want for easy retrieval.

Works for me, and no one minds the clutter!

[ragswl4]

I voted "I have a better way". Don't know if its any better than anyone else's but I arrange them on a shelf in the shop by name and issue number or date. That's the good part.

Then I blow sawdust and woodchips all over them and occasionally wonder where I saw that article about a clever way to do something that I need to do.

If I had the time I would remove the good, useful articles and scan them into the portable computer that I have in the shop and organize them so I could find what I need. Alas, too many irons in the huge, burning fire.