Relatively recently, I’ve come back to my first collecting love, stamps and I’ve noticed that every single time I’ve come back to it, and I do this every couple of years, I go looking for the nostalgia of a stamp newspaper of some sort.
Yet there’s really no way to go home again.
Way, way back when, we used to subscribe to Linn’s Stamp News for years and years. This was back in the old days when you got an issue on newsprint every single week and it was packed full of news, information and tons and tons of ads. There’s just something about the tactile feel of paging through this thing every week that strikes a nostalgic chord.
Of course, those days are long gone. They stopped making the weekly physical paper more than a decade ago, instead going to a monthly glossy magazine that’s more flash than substance and I’ve got no interest in that. It also costs about as much today for 12 issues as I used to get every single week for 52.
Right after I started to collect again, or maybe just before I decided to, we were in the local mall and I went into Barnes & Nobel to see if I could grab a stamp magazine, just because I had the itch. They had nothing I was interested in. I think there was one that was stamps and coins, 95% coins and hardly any stamps, so I didn’t bother. I still get the itch to go through something now and then though. It’s really like wanting to subscribe to physical magazines again. Just getting something in the mail that you look forward to, that’s a special feel that just can’t be replicated by anything online.
Yet magazines have gone the way of the dodo around here. I think the last one that we received was a gaming magazine that we got for free from Gamestop and even there, we swapped over to the electronic version before we ultimately cancelled it because we just never looked at it anymore.
The same was true of Linn’s though. Way back in the day, and this must have been in the late 90s, we’d put them down on the dining room table as they arrived and then, they started to pile up. It wasn’t as bad as the daily newspaper, of course. Those came every morning and there was a box by the door into which they got thrown, until there were too many and we just threw them all away unread, with the rubber band still in place. It was a complete waste of time and money so we cancelled and haven’t missed them since.
I suppose Linn’s was largely the same way. As much as I supposed that I wanted to page through them, I just ran out of time. My collecting interests were limited and so much of what they contained didn’t interest me and therefore, I might page through to see if anything caught my eye, but otherwise, I didn’t bother. After a while, they got higher and higher until they got filed away somewhere. Before we moved the last time, all of my magazines just got donated to the local library. I had no more need for physical things.
Yes, I know I can subscribe to the weekly release online but it’s just not the same. It’s more the thought of what I’d hoped that Linn’s would be than the reality of what they actually were. You no longer have to wait a month, or a week, or even a day, to find the latest news. It’s there instantly. It’s really what killed magazines at all. Why bother? They’re doing nothing for me anymore.
That doesn’t mean I don’t get the desire to revisit those days from time to time and for some reason, today I was feeling it. I don’t know why, I know that even if I could find a magazine to buy, I wouldn’t bother because I know that what I’m seeking, it isn’t between the covers, it’s inside of my head. So maybe I’m just going down memory lane. You do that when you get old. Wouldn’t it be nice if some things were actually still around and better than you remembered?
Sometimes, I think it would.
