Sunday, December 26, 2010

Photo mags and libraries

I've been addicted to photo magazines since I was fourteen. Especially some Swedish ones which were big and outstanding quality (I guess I can read Swedish because my mother was Swedish. It's a bit similar to Danish, but there are many, many words which are very different, enough so many people just switch to English between the countries). (I can't speak it though. I ought to be able to, but I seem to have a block there. There's something about the cadence which is really different from Danish.)

I was reminded of a funny little story: in the nineties I lived close to an excellent library, and *man* did I get some use out of that. I devoured tons of books, magazines, CDs, comics.
One of the things I enjoyed was archived hardbound collections of photo magazines. (When they had a full year they bound them and archived them.) I got all of those that I could, usually needed help because they had to get them in from elsewhere.
I actually wonder now if anybody else where ever reading those, except in the very rare case that there was something very specific in an old mag they had to look up? Considering this, it's an excellent service and practice by the libraries, I think.

One day I was talking to a librarian about yet another one of those hardbound collections to be retrieved, and two other librarians where standing close, and they laughed good-naturedly. The first librarian looked at them, and one of them explained: “you’re the only one here so far this guy had not yet gotten hold of to get these things.”

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Photo mags like Hustler and Penthouse...