I just keep mine (and too many, I confess) in the cardboard slip cases that generally hold about a year's worth of most magazines. I buy the really cheap ones at IKEA, but you can get them at all levels of quality, starting with IKEA, but also from almost any office supply store, decorating store, etc. I think it is The Container Store that sells them in lucite.

Here are some ideas from The Container Store:

magazine storage

We should start a club. I usually rip pages out, but I do keep a lot of magazines. My sister works for a large, local company that owns a publishing outfit and I get them dirt cheap, so how can I not order them?!

In the main level guest bedroom armoire, there is a small shelf inside so I put a ton up there. Out of sight, but when DD1 visits she can flip through them.

I bought this table for the sunroom (all-in-one machine now sits in blank spot). The minute I saw it I thought "magazine shelf." lol

{{!gwi}}

The guest bedroom and DD2's old room both have old, metal magazine holders next to chairs and the sunroom table has two small stacks of keepers.

I actually like magazines in a basket. I also have an old wooden box next to my leather chair that usually holds magazines. I've seen these lots at antique stores in varying sizes. But then again I have wedding photos on my wall too...lol. Here's a pic where you can see the box.

My name is Syllabus and I am a magazine hoarder. It is incurable & the afliction has spread throughout our house.

The quilting mags are in slipcases on bookshelves in the sewing room. Filed by title or by project wishing.

The garden mags are in slipcases filed by title on a bookcase in the sunroom. This bookcase also holds antique & newer garden books & a collection of bird-related what-nots.

The cooking mags are w/ the cookbooks on a long shelf that runs along under 2 windows in the sunroom. Picture a window seat w/ an open bottom. The top acts as a repository for current library books, mags, birdwatching binoculars, potted plants. Comfortable chairs & lighting make this a wonderful browsing & garden gazing spot.

The deco mags are in either an antique copper kettle in the den or in the basket by my reading chair.

There are some others that reside in stacks on shelves in the laundry room. And there are always a few on tables here & there. I try to only keep current ones out...
I flip thru all of them from time to time & they do get somewhat culled & recycled or donated.

Friends & relatives who come to visit love that I have so many that they can go to & flip thru. I enjoy having them take a stack to bed w/ them or sitting & talking about articles w/ me.

It's probably just me... but I get a weird feeling when I go in a house & there are NO books or NO mags anywhere to be seen. I think the reading matter in a home says a lot about the people who live there. :)

magazine hoarder here! I also take a stack to bed or to the tub!

mimi_2006,

Can you tell me something about that rug? It's beautiful. What are the colors?

Oh, and yes, I'm a total magazine junky, too. I keep thinking that when I'm done with the house (like THAT will ever happen), that I'll donate them but I'm badly attached.

Yep -- another member of the Magazine Addicted club!

Usually kept on my table by MY reading chair (two stacks) -- and then another stack in the bedroom .....

I do rip out pages and keep them ..... but I'm really thinking of dumping them ..... but it is so HARD to let them go!!! (LOL!!! :))

I still have my favorite inspiration magazines from two years ago when we were building the house! Those are at least put away in a closet. I noticed that my magazines are starting to accumulate on the screened porch, too. I pick one up to look through with my morning coffee after I'm bored with the newspaper (since I read the news online).

Glad I'm not alone in this club!

Thanks meg711...the rug is a Karastan brand and it's called Paysage. It's a soft mossy green, brownish reds, cream, some gold, with a little teal blue splashed around. Brought a small one home for hearth room but it didn't work so well in there. I liked it so much though I got a bigger one for living room. Glad you like it :-)

And now I don't feel nearly so bad about filling my wooden box with magazines...lol.

I am a former hoarder. I am curred. Wish I could say the same for my dh. I get my magazine, tear out any recipe that I actually think I may make and also any decor idea that I really know I need to save. I have a binder for the recipes, which I am currently tearing out the recipes which I thought I would make but never have in over 3yrs since I started doing this. The mag is tossed, taken to work lunchroom or kids class for art projects.

My dh gets medical mags so they sit on counter with nasty pics of gross wounds and eye afflictions that could make one puke!!!!! Once the stack gets to a few inches I move it to his office to make another stack. A few times a year, when he can no longer step over them, he tosses them. I used to put them in a basket in the "library" but it would gross out guests taking relief in there. But since we don't have many guests, and it is not porn, I may put a basket back in there after I redo the decor.

I have tried to get my mom to toss her stuff, it is amazing how someone who lives in a tiny travel trailer thinks she needs some of these things. Tear out the recipes and move on I say!!!!!!!!!!

I say if you must hoard, do it neatly and accessible for easy access.

I am laughing at the nasty wound and medical afflictions magazines because my husband gets them too, I made the mistake of flipping through one once, awful!! I hide them on his side under the bed then when get too bad I put them in his car and make him take them to his office.
I have stacks and stacks of decorating magazines that I'm afraid to throw away because I might "need them" some day. We are building and I might go through them to look at trim, then next month go through them looking at tile etc. I am putting built in shelves in a room just for the magazines, it's in a room where they are out of the way. But I must cut them down somehow because they are getting out of control!

Thanks for the info Mimi,

I looked it up on the Karastan site and on Macy's and can't believe how different it looks. I completely overlooked it because it looked so green online but, in your room, it's a lovely light shade of green. I'll have to go find it in person although I'm a blue person.

Here is a link that might be useful: Karastan Paysage

meg...You're right, it looks NOTHING like the online pics of that color. It's much softer and muted. Good luck to you. I like blue too but I branched out in my new home...lol.

I have a couple of shelves of my bookshelves devoted to my accumulation of American Bungalows and Old House Journals/Old House Interiors. I went to do the tear-out thing on those and realized that I was tearing out half of every issue, and that all those pages were more disorganized than just keeping the darn magazines, which have such neat things as tables of contents! LOL When I got cooking magazines, I actually copied out the recipes I wanted to try - going to that effort let me weed out whether I REALLY wanted to try it. I noticed when I went to clean out my recipe box that I hadn't tried 98% of the recipes, so I cancelled my subscriptions.

I'm looking forward to getting my apple crate back for the magazines in temporary circulation - for the last 5 years it's held firewood, but there's no fireplace in this house. I expect there'll be a copper pot in the loo to hold more reading material (Reader's Digest is best for bathrooms!), or perhaps I'll use my antique chamberpot for that. :-)

If you don't have an Ikea handy (I don't, wah) most office supply stores have flat-packed cardboard magazine file boxes for very cheap, and if you're crafty you could cover them with wallpaper, fabric or some such thing.

I'm another one who's fond of the basket full of magazines. In fact, I have two versions: a basket and an antique copper scuttle. I went through a period where I had no time to read the magazines, but they just kept coming. So I stashed them in the basket and scuttle, and go through them as I have time. This summer I made inroads in the collection, but many remain for winter perusing. This is fine with me.

Susan

Oh boy can I relate! I have magazines from 15 years ago. Time to let go? I actually have wire racks in the basement for them(plus baskets and stacks upstairs. They are pretty orderly,but still taking up space! My dh just started collecting. I love to grab a cup of coffee at night and flip thru(not reading just looking at the pictures!:0)

This is truth. When we moved here, our kids who are quite experienced movers (2 of them worked for moving van company, 1 as a supervisor while in college) helped us move. The "supervisor" one instructed all the packing and planning so as to make as few trips on moving van as possible. We started out at 5 a.m. and by midnight, I had the beds made in this house and cooked breakfast the next morning so having experienced movers, a few cars, trucks and a lot of warm bodies is a great asset on moving day. Not one item was broken. Not a single scratch.

The son who was in charge, sotaspeak stated at 8 p.m., "Well, Mom, it went pretty good but #3 tore a cover off a Southern Living magazine from 1967, so you might want to talk to him about it."

LOL. It was a joke but he was just making a statement about decorating magazines. I did, in fact, have about 30 years of BH&G, about 20 of Southern Living and numerous gardening magazine subscriptions through the years.

Soon after we moved in, I noticed how our doctor office never has good magazines, so we loaded 3 moving van boxes and took them to his office after we tore name/address stickers off.

A month later I was in his office as a patient, and nothing there but golfing magazines. I asked his nurse and she closed the door, whispered to me, "His wife came and got them."

Never again will I work that hard to take anything to their office. I used to drive into town and take them fresh roses 1-2 per month. Never again!

I used to take them to my hairdressers. She gets People plus some retirement and travel magazines. Only house magazines are a local publication and Southern Living. I did that a few months, then stopped because they were no longer there.

fwiw, I never see the retirement age women reading the AARP type magazines and no one glances at the hairstyle ones.

I sold a ton before we moved in our yard sale.

All right...I admit it...I too was a magazine hoarder. I had a serious collection of 'em. I was very content with my collection of various magazines until one day dh & I had to clear out the room where my magazines were stored. I have to admit it was a gut-buster & dh muttered 'n groaned about, "saving all of these magazines that probably don't ever get looked at."

I just couldn't bear to throw 'em out & thought about tearing out pages & making a scrapbook of the features I liked in each of them.

One day I decided I'd go through each of them & scan the ones I liked and create a scrapbook in my computer. I have folders for living room, family room, bedroom, accessories, etc. It works very nicely & is a lot easier to access this way then to try remembering which magazine a feature is in. It took some time doing it, 'cause I did a li'l at a time, but I'm magazine free now...and dh is a lot happier. LOL

Next we'll be addressing dh's serious tool collection! LOL

I am feeling so much better about my addiction! My DH doesn't have any problem getting me to run errands to our hardware stroe because all of their magazines are 10% off all the time! My grocery store is doing this now. It's so hard to go through the line and not pick up Southern Accents, Tradional Home, Cottage Living, etc. I had cancelled all subscriptions except for Fine Gardening thinking that I didn't need all those magazines -- now, I find myself lured to them like a kid drooling over a candy bar! LOL

Cameron

I have tons of mags and DH is always asking me to get rid of them. I don't want to just throw them in the trash...seems like such a waste. Are there places that could use them?

LOL, Patricia. I can absolutely see that seen in my mind.

I'm not a magazine hoarder. I can't imagine having 20-30 years of a magazine. I like suzy zone6's idea of scanning in what is of interest to you. I have known some magazine hoarders with collections of a number of years of particular magazines. Despite the claims that they went back and read them, I never saw the dust move off the piles. I find it a waste of space to save old magazines. What would be the point of going back a few years when whatever was shown is dated and out of style.

I went through and culled old ones when we finally moved into this house. What was fascinating to me was that I'm still drawn to the same colorways that I have always liked, and that certain rooms shown seemed terribly dated, while others looked as current to me now as they did years ago. My library refused them, but our recycling center took them. In the short time we've been here, I've managed to accumulate a couple of stacks on the coffee table in the study. I do get rid of them more readily than I used though, especially volumes that contained very few interesting articles or photos.

All of you utilize various "systems" for your magazine storage and those organization skills are to be admired. I've often thought about developing a system that will work for me...mostly at the times the leaning stacks fall over.

Last week, while uprighting yet another stack, I came up with a system that will be perfect! I can hardly wait to get it set up! I've decided I'm going start on it right after I get those Xerox paper boxes full with 30 years' worth of family pictures sorted and put into albums.

I was just thinking...

In the hospitals, in my area, a Candy Striper (volunteer) goes around room to room offering patients a book or magazine to read.

I wonder if maybe the hospitals would be interested in having decor magazines too. Hmm...might be worth looking in to.

LOL! teedup1 I also have some very, very, old family photographs that are fragile and precious to me. I also scanned each one of them and burned them on a cd and put the cd away in my safe in case something were to happen to the originals.

I'm in the process now of scanning some of my current photos too. I hope the scanner holds out! LOL

I do have to laugh at the comment "What would be the point of going back a few years when whatever was shown is dated and out of style." First and most important, many of us aren't "slaves to fashion" and don't give a rat's rump in a rainstorm what's "in style" and "out of style". With the magazines I get, the decorating style is 100 years old so "in style" and "out of style" doesn't matter a whit! (The best way to avoid being noticeably out of style is to be way, WAY out of style. LOL) Much of what I save "Old House Journals" for is articles about repairs or new products, and "in style" doesn't really count when you're talking about something like exterior trimwork restoration after removing vinyl siding. :-)

It would be great if more magazines would put their back issues on CD (the whole issue so you can look page by page, not just a few articles - a good chunk of the time when I go back to look something up, I'm looking for an ad for a company whose name I can't remember!) or online. It is very rare that a company puts all of their articles online though, server space costs money. But I'd pay $5 more per subscription to get a nice little CD at the end of the year with all the year's issues on it, with an index - magazines are mostly set up electronically now, so it's not like some poor lackey would have to sit down and scan every issue page by page (although isn't that what interns are for? LOL). It's a much bigger project than I can manage, with an old, slow scanner and computer, and without the right software.

I did recently go back and reread my entire collection of "American Bungalow" magazines, about 15 years' worth of quarterlies. Am I strange? :-)

Early issues of startup magazines can be quite valuable to collectors in years to come, too. Complete multi-year runs even more so. I dropped out of several serious bidding wars over complete runs of the first few years of "American Bungalow" because they just went too high, so I'm missing the first couple of years.

Magazines on CDs! That's an awesome idea! I'm using Google Notebook to virtually "clip" things online. If magazines were on CDs, it would realy be easy to create a virtual inspiration notebook.

As for gardening magazines -- the information is beyond "in style". An article on how to use, and care for, ornamental grasses in a landscape is timeless.

I keep three months worth of magazines then I cut interesting things out and toss the rest - I use baskets for storage - one next to my bed, one under an old table, a basket under an old dresser in the living room.....I just can't handled hundreds of magazines stuffed everywhere. I do have lots of Christmas magazines but I will probably throw all of them when I move next year...the truth is I don't refer back to any of them very often.

V.A. Hospitals always need magazines! (As one who has spent much time in them with my DH, I know.)

I take all our "done with" there & encourage others to do the same. Many times patients have to see several different doctors and spend the entire day in one waiting room or another. You see many female veterans and wives with nothing to read except fishing, hunting, sports and golf. Readers can always spot other readers casting eyes about near desperation. :)

Paperbacks are always welcomed for their small libraries too.
Suzi

I am a magazine addict too! I even go to the used book store and buy other people's old magazines :O) When the piles get too high, I cut out pictures that I want to save, and add them to my album - a photo album with the clingy plastic covered pages. When it's time to do over a room, I flip through my photo album. I also have a CD with pictures that I save on the computer, and I love the idea of scanning my pictures and putting them all on CD!

Hi! I usually lurk here but as a semi reformed magazine addict I wanted to share a tip with you. If you can't bear to throw away the magazine, instead of tearing out pages you want to keep...tear out the pages with ads on both sides. You don't have to agonize over which pictures you want to save so its very fast. If you have a huge collection just start with a couple of magazines at a time. You'll be amazed at how much less space they take up! This works well for magazines that are bound like Traditional Home and is more challenging for those bound like Southern Living.

I know I am bumping this up but I just found this forum and love this subject matter. I too am an addict. Until our renovation began and they needed to be temporarily relocated, they were filed alphabetically and then chronologically.

Knowing that the kitchen is our next project I have already purchased 100+ mags - enough to buy a number of cabinets from a high end cabinet line! A neighbor who was starting her project last year asked if she could borrow my mags to look through. With great reluctance I turned them over. Don't you know she had dog-eared a bizillion pages to show her hubby. After I shed my tears I have been trying to salvage them ever sense. My kids think I am OC and my husband - well he knows enough not to comment.

First step is admitting you have a problem.

It's not a problem, it's a hobby and it's enjoyable :)) except for the storage issue, of course.

What a great tip!! I love my mags and can't rip them up to save pics (which get lost that way it seems) -- but the ads and stuff! what a great idea.

When we did some remodeling, I realized my hoarded gardening and cooking magazines were a problem. I took the big step, and took half of them to our local library, which has a free magazine rack by the front door. They were gobbled up in no time, and I found I really didn't miss them at all. Then I began to realize that the magazine websites (and tons of other resources I can google in seconds) had all of the information crammed into all those magazines, so I trotted the other half to the library and was amazed at how tidy my newly scoured area was! The only ones I kept were my La Vie Claire, which are so very beautiful they are like books. Now I pass the magazines on as I finish them, although I have been known to tear out a few favorite pages.

I keep them for awhile and then rip out my favorite pages and store them together and threaten to make a scrap book out of them. HOWEVER, when I started to organize them I realized that different magazines, different months, different rooms, SAME rooms! At least I am consistant in what I like.

Great thread! Glad to know others share my problem! I didn't realize how bad my problem was until I packed them up for the remodel into boxes and saw how much cubic footage they claimed. I have cooking magazines that go back to '99 and I accumulated probably a 100 kitchen & bath mags during the last year planning and executing the remodel. Even though I'm pretty much done, I still find myself looking at the racks in stores. In my defense, I do sit down and go through all the Oct/Nov/Dec cooking mags every year about October to pick out things I want to cook during the holidays that year. Some recurring favorites, some experiments. I find myself doing that in the spring/summer too, looking for recipes for fresh, seasonal food. My problem with clipping the recipes is that I want to keep the pics, too.

Anyway, I wanted to say thanks for the scanning idea, Suzy. I intend to work on getting my office and guest room back into shape this weekend converting them back to functional space from them from my temporary remodel storage. I think I'm going to go scanner shopping first! And I might try just the ad removal for the holiday issues.

Cameron: You have to be absolutely ruthless--lol--and give away what you are sure you will never look at again. I keep some in a basket by the fireplace, and carefully selected others I put in the same cardboard slip cases that Les uses. For me to keep a magazine, it has to have something featured that I know for sure has real possibility of being applicable to a future project. That's what I do, anyway.

I currently have 6 magazine subscriptions. I have formed the habit of tearing out articles I like, and pictures for future use, and then I freecycle the mags I'm done with. I hate clutter! I have the intention of putting them in leather binders and then on my built in shelves, just have to find the time to do it.

I keep a few in a magazine holder I bought at Tuesday Morning. Usually we weed out the ones that are more than 4 months old and I donate to the gym (people love to read while on certain machines) or to schools for the kids to make collages. I cannot stand having clutter.

Polly, you sound like me :-)

I have years of the best of food and decorating magazines stored in plastic boxes in order. They are in excellent condition, and I want to GIVE THEM TO SOMEONE OR AN ORGANIZATION THAT CAN USE THEM. Can anyone suggest who I might contact? Maybe a library or a school that focuses on decorating,the culinary artsI NO LONGER WANT TO STORE THEM>