Difficult Surgery

No doubt like most of us from a certain age of waragming, I have bought and hoarded hundreds of hobby magazines. Wargames Illustrated and Miniatrure Wargames provided inspiration, information and essential advertising and access to models and figures. Remember when you had to buy a magazine, raise a postal order or foreign bank cheque just to mail off a physical letter to get a catalogue? The good old days ... not really.
I've kept my magazines as essential go-to references for uniform guides, scenarios, historical campaign summaries and to stare at the pretty pictures. Well that's all finished now.
I'm packing away my bursting book shelves to prepare for a major house renovation and when I got to the magazines I had to reassess their genuine worth. Representing thousands of dollars of investment over thirty years I came to understand that they have no intrinsic value left. I haven't had cause to look at them in years and and they are just taking up space. I haven't bought a magazine in years either. Just a few magazines equates to a far more valuable reference book. They were always of variable and unpredictable usefulness even in their heyday. Mining the collection looking for a specific article was also problematic. Their own searchable PDF offerings were testament to that.
So, I threw them away. Once treasured and now trashed. My wargaming buddies didn't want them either. I get everything I used to get from magazines from the internet and more. On-line shopping is addictively superior, information is abundant and inspiration is found in the forums to which I contribute and the blogs I follow. My fellow bloggers are in fact the people who would have submitted articles to magazines - they may still do.
They are now gone ... such is life.