fimmtudagur, 12. febrúar 2015
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Magazines - Aspirational Clutter?
It's no surprise that my blog post "Hoarding, Collecting or Savvy Buying" is one of the most popular on this blog. Most model railroaders I know (including me!) are buried in inventory. In this case the inventory is not the yet-to-built kits, detail parts endless stacks of "someday" projects and the like.
Instead, I'm talking about what to do with the one common element that unites virtually every model railroader - the seemingly endless stacks (or boxes, or shelves...) of old model railroad magazines.
To understand my point you need to realize the publishing industry sees a magazine as nothing more than an advertising delivery system. - The goal is to tempt consumers with editorial content to read and enjoy and for them to (hopefully) buy stuff from the advertisers, and then dispose of the magazine just in time for the next issue to arrive and tempt them with more wonderful products and services.
Model railroaders seem to have missed the "dispose" part of the equation - it's truly remarkable how many old magazines are sitting under model railroads. I remember when I worked at Kalmbach the non-hobbyist employees were always surprised when a reader would come by the office for a tour and more often than not quip "I've been getting MR and Trains since I was a kid, and I still have every issue!" (I should add they often had similar collections of RMC, Mainline Modeler, Narrow Gauge Gazette, et al....)
Two events coincided to bring this up as a blog post. I don't as a rule spend a lot of time reading non-railroad blogs (though there are a few finance/investing bloggers I follow) but recently came across this blog while searching about the internet for storage ideas for my wife's art room.
You can read the full post here (http://www.365lessthings.com/magazines/).
It's an interesting post but these two paragraphs really resonated with me. Read them and see if this doesn't remind you of a model railroader (or three) you might know:
The consensus from the online discussion was to keep the magazines intact - after all your interests may change in 10 years and you don't want to be stuck without a one-page article from the April 1948 MR or whatever.
The "ideal" solution was to keep the magazines intact and invest in a series of large, heavy open side file cabinets kept under the layout and mounted on wheels.
I've taken the opposite approach - and have decided that our home, and to a greater extent the layout room, is no longer going to look like a public library and storehouse for stacks of paper that I rarely, if ever, use. To that end, many of the magazines have gone - and likely more will follow.
I found the premise that magazines represent aspirational clutter to be interesting. The word "aspiration" is an interesting one - it always seemed far more pessimistic to me than the similar-sounding "inspiration."
Aspiration, to me, smacks of dreams that are reached for, but never quite achieved.
Inspiration expresses a more positive outlook on things.
I think it's interesting that the blogger quoted chose the word she did.
Instead of providing inspiration the magazines represent clutter - something that can easily impact the creative process.
I can say that having disposed of a lot of magazines over the last couple of years I truly don't miss them. I still find inspiration in what other modelers are doing, but more frequently that inspiration is neatly stored in a box on my desk connected to the internet and not in magazine files underfoot.
Magazines - Aspirational Clutter?
It's no surprise that my blog post "Hoarding, Collecting or Savvy Buying" is one of the most popular on this blog. Most model railroaders I know (including me!) are buried in inventory. In this case the inventory is not the yet-to-built kits, detail parts endless stacks of "someday" projects and the like.Instead, I'm talking about what to do with the one common element that unites virtually every model railroader - the seemingly endless stacks (or boxes, or shelves...) of old model railroad magazines.
To understand my point you need to realize the publishing industry sees a magazine as nothing more than an advertising delivery system. - The goal is to tempt consumers with editorial content to read and enjoy and for them to (hopefully) buy stuff from the advertisers, and then dispose of the magazine just in time for the next issue to arrive and tempt them with more wonderful products and services.
Model railroaders seem to have missed the "dispose" part of the equation - it's truly remarkable how many old magazines are sitting under model railroads. I remember when I worked at Kalmbach the non-hobbyist employees were always surprised when a reader would come by the office for a tour and more often than not quip "I've been getting MR and Trains since I was a kid, and I still have every issue!" (I should add they often had similar collections of RMC, Mainline Modeler, Narrow Gauge Gazette, et al....)
Two events coincided to bring this up as a blog post. I don't as a rule spend a lot of time reading non-railroad blogs (though there are a few finance/investing bloggers I follow) but recently came across this blog while searching about the internet for storage ideas for my wife's art room.
You can read the full post here (http://www.365lessthings.com/magazines/).
It's an interesting post but these two paragraphs really resonated with me. Read them and see if this doesn't remind you of a model railroader (or three) you might know:
"Then there is the futile exercise of saving magazines for those few articles that you might want to refer back to later on. Or cutting them out and filing then in plastic sleeves in a folder somewhere. My experience of this is, without proper, time consuming indexing, it is difficult to find those articles again when, or if, you ever do want to reference them. This is another form or aspirational clutter. And once again it is so much easier to find this information on the internet, with a few key words typed into your computers search bar."
"I am speaking from experience here. I once used to save every issue of several paper crafting magazines and save clippings from catalogues etc. Now I find all the inspiration or information I need with the tap of a few keys. No, heavy lifting, no allergy issues from the dust when dragged out after long periods, no having to dust them in between times, no big bulky bookcase to store them in, no wasted money, no wasted trees, no frustrating advertising, no agonising over if and when to declutter them, and no constant aspiration of actually doing something with the information in those articles I once thought I couldn�t live without."
Reading this post coincided with an online discussion several model railroaders were having of the best way to store old magazines. I, like many of you, have tried the "cut out the articles of particular interest" approach, placing all those articles neatly in file folders that I never look at.The consensus from the online discussion was to keep the magazines intact - after all your interests may change in 10 years and you don't want to be stuck without a one-page article from the April 1948 MR or whatever.
The "ideal" solution was to keep the magazines intact and invest in a series of large, heavy open side file cabinets kept under the layout and mounted on wheels.
I've taken the opposite approach - and have decided that our home, and to a greater extent the layout room, is no longer going to look like a public library and storehouse for stacks of paper that I rarely, if ever, use. To that end, many of the magazines have gone - and likely more will follow.
I found the premise that magazines represent aspirational clutter to be interesting. The word "aspiration" is an interesting one - it always seemed far more pessimistic to me than the similar-sounding "inspiration."
Aspiration, to me, smacks of dreams that are reached for, but never quite achieved.
Inspiration expresses a more positive outlook on things.
I think it's interesting that the blogger quoted chose the word she did.
Instead of providing inspiration the magazines represent clutter - something that can easily impact the creative process.
I can say that having disposed of a lot of magazines over the last couple of years I truly don't miss them. I still find inspiration in what other modelers are doing, but more frequently that inspiration is neatly stored in a box on my desk connected to the internet and not in magazine files underfoot.
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