I Don’t Have a Problem and I Know It

I like special edition magazines.  Collector’s editions, commemorative issues, whatever label you want to slap on them, I like them.  At last count (which was just now), I currently have forty-six of these specialty magazines.  That number is certainly no world record and I’m definitely not vying for one.  Is forty-six on the high side?

People (I’m not going to say friends, I’m just going to say people, but these people are friends) have asked me why I buy them.  Well, why not?  I view them as little gems of information, filled with historical facts, and I only buy the ones that interest me.

I’m sure the information is crammed away somewhere in a blog article on the backside of the World Wide Web, and it can probably all be found for free.  But there’s something about holding a physical book or magazine, isn’t there?  I buy print and digital books (I have way more books than magazines, I’ll tell ya that right now), physical and digital comic books, but I’ve never bought a digital magazine.  I enjoy the pictures more with print magazines.

Get your minds out of the gutter.

I have magazines about World Wars I and II, about FDR, aliens, the occult, Jack the Ripper and outlaws of the Old West.  It’s the historical ones I enjoy most.  Look at the haunting images in Ghost Towns, or all the faces staring back at us in The Roaring ’20s.  They are a time capsule, of sorts, for certain, but, like books, those photographs, married to the words, are a time machine, also.  Look at the faces of the men heading to war, or the ones already in the trenches.  Look at the gunfighters, proud, ordinary, or the death photos of those a little slower on the draw.

I joke and say the magazines I buy are for research, but everyone knows they are not.  They are for my enjoyment and my amusement.  A friend of mine, and fellow writer, recently said he felt like he was born in the wrong time.  I can relate.  A lot of these “Commemorative Editions” kindle my time-travel fantasies to visit years long gone.  Sometimes, though, I don’t if I wish to visit history I never experienced, or if I miss the past I lived.

Whenever I read a magazine about reincarnation, maybe I can let you know.