What amazes me is the idea that at some point, a human being took their last look at the artwork of their gemstone jewellry, and then .. some thousands of years later, here we are gazing into the same nooks and crannies in wonder at the skills of the artist. One wonders, will some AI archeologist in the future, be digging through a cacaphonic digital noise, find some long-forgotten iCloud backup, and wonder at the collection of garden pictures I've left behind ..
I remember reading Scientific American magazines in my local library in the third world as a kid.
I was blown away by the ads.
From useless gadgets that will probably be fun for an hour or two only to very expensive ones aimed at people with clearly a ton of disposable income.
Lawnmowers you can ride on?! A thing just to detect rings in the sand? How rich are these people? A watch that sets itself to an atomic clock? An astronaut pen that writes underwater? Telescopes in your back yard?!
The sheer volume and variety of ads told me that the economy of that place was in a totally different league from my own.
I think the other reply is referring to folks who collect and sell old magazines. I can only speak from second-hand experience, though, as I knew a person who used to do this. When eBay was just getting started, she was collecting old magazines and trimming the ads from them, then selling them as a lower bulk collection (she also took jeans with holes in them, patched them with colorful fabric and resold them on early eBay but different story).
I don't know why this was a thing, but I remember her telling me she got the idea from a local library that preserved its periodicals, so maybe it started at libraries. Personally, were I to collect magazines, I would want the ads intact. Not because I love adverts (quite the opposite, actually), but my collector brain's notion of preserving a thing in its original state is at odds with the idea of removing the ads.
In libraries we don't get the ads cut out. But yeah most of the physical periodicals will be bound in yearly volumes. Much easier to deal with. It's disappearing now though, with most periodicals only being published digitally.
I assume he means things like the Strand Magazine, that Sherlock Holmes was first published in, it's not unusual to find copies bound into hardback books like that.
