Land of Oz

Magazine Peeves

I like to read magazines. I subscribe to several, buy several from the newsstand, and read some at libraries and break rooms. For all that, there's a bunch of stuff that really ticks me off about them. And yes, while I understand the reasoning behind most of the problems I identify, I still don't like them.

Blow in cards. One or two is one thing, but some magazines seem to come with dozens these days. Next time you go to Barnes and Noble or Waldens look at the floor in front of the magazine rack and you'll dozens of cards on the floor depending on how often the clerks clean up. However, I think what's worse are the bound in cards. Many are bound in so tight, that you rip the page trying to pull them out. There should be only one or two cards, either blown in or lightly glued in. They do make good bookmarks.

Bound in junk. I've been getting magazines lately where the bound in ad/magazinelet/whatever (sometimes it's hard to tell) is bigger than the actual magazine I bought. I really hate the extra thick pages that are bound in as tight as the normal pages. I'm sure I'm not the only one who likes to flip through the pages and those fat pages always make you skip a page or two (which is what I'm sure they're designed to do). It's not bad when you have something glued in with the snot-looking glue, you can pull them out and roll the glue up into a little snot ball decoy, but they usually come out without damage. Which is more than you can say for the heavy single pages bound in. I tear all that crap out and bin it without even reading it.

Ads that look like copy. This bugs me big time. There's sometimes a "advertising section" header or footer, but the ad is still designed to look like it's part of the magazine. Sometimes those things are dozens of wasted pages long - and again, it's tear and toss for me. Even if it means I sometimes lose a real article or two.

Lastly, continued articles and no page numbers. I understand trying to get certain stories in the front of the magazine, so they tack on the rest of the story hidden in the back someplace. Why not keep it all together - I'm not going to skip an article just because it's towards the back of the magazine, but I'm more likely to give up in disgust after trying to find the continued pages - because most of the time there aren't any damn page number in the back. It'll be continued on page 125 and the closest page number is 98, so you have to count from there. If you want to continue stories all over the back of your magazine, you should be bound by law to put page numbers back there.