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Where to purchase old magazines?


JHD

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For various reasons, I am unwilling to purchase anything from eBay -- I much prefer shopping and brick and mortar stores.

I routinely scour thrift shops and used bookstores in search of items of interest, one of which is (obviously) classic video games.

I only VERY rarely find video game magazines for sale -- in the past five years, I have encountered maybe 3 or 4 random issues of various titles (across numerous shops in several different  cities -- I travel frequently). 

Does anyone have any suggestions where to find old gaming magazines, other than eBay?   I would like to contribute to the scanning project, but that would first require finding something to scan...

 

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There are several such places here in Japan, including online stores which sell old magazines (sometimes even very old magazines from 60-70 years ago.)

But in the US?  Good luck.  I wanna say you'd have better luck finding a pile of old mags at a yard sale/flea market/swap meet than you would finding them on sale in a store.  I hate eBay, too, but old magazines aren't something you're going to find at too many B&Ms in America.

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Actually I am in Canada rather than the United States 😎 Some magazines (e.g. Game Informer) are just not sold in this country, so I will never see any second-hand copies, but otherwise the market is about the same (albeit much smaller than in the US).

I visit Goodwill (and similar stores) about twice monthly, especially looking for books. There are often old magazines to be found, but almost never anything gaming-related.

Alas, garage sales around here are hardly worth the effort -- I see kitchen stuff, kid's toys, and romance novels, but nothing much else. 

I shall continue to search, and hopefully someday I will be able to contribute something. 

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Game Informer is sold in most EB Games stores. That is where I would pick it up when I didn't have a subscription (also in Canada, by the way).

I have seen Nintendo Power at the Microplay near my place, but they are the later issues and they want $5 each. There's another place that has some old game magazines as well. I get mine from ebay. These days I am only looking for stuff that I can scan for the site since I have most of the magazines that I want.

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Yeah, I think E-Day is proof that getting old magazines in Canada isn't much different from getting them anywhere else.  But if you're unwilling to use eBay, it really limits your options, since that's where most people wanting to sell are going to take their product.  You're not seeing gaming mags at Goodwill and yard sales because most people are savvy enough to know that they can sell them on eBay for a higher profit than they'd get by taking them to those places.

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I look at this as a long, LONG-term hobby. I am willing to trade my time for money.

For example, I badly wanted an Atari Flashback 2, but I was unwilling to buy one on eBay. It took me about 10 or 12 years to find one in a thrift shop, but now I have it! 🙂

To give another, non-gaming example, there was a series of 12 (history) books that I wanted. The publisher went bankrupt towards the end, and the last few volumes in the series are extremely hard to find due to low print-runs. A few local used bookstores have complete sets, and they charge whatever the market will bear.

Over the course of more than a decade (and visiting multiple thrift stores in two cities) I assembled the whole set -- one or two volumes at a time. I never paid more than $5 for any one volume, and sometimes much less.  

I will continue to (slowly) search for magazines and, hopefully, find something that I will be able to contribute. 

 

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Well...good luck, I guess?  Hopefully you manage to be able to help out within the next 10 or 12 years.  And hey, by that time, pretty much every gaming mag ever published will be allowed by our cutoff dates here, so your options will be wide open. 😋

Fortunately for everyone who visits this site, there are people who are willing to contribute their time and/or money to provide content for everyone else at no cost.  When I decided I wanted to contribute, I was in the situation of having neither a scanner, nor access to any magazines (all the mags I owned were in storage in another country).  So I bought a scanner from Amazon and a couple of lots of magazines from Yahoo Auctions (the eBay of Japan), and within a week, was working towards adding the first-ever Japanese mags to our site.  The desire to help is a start, but it's the decision to actually do it that matters.  Even if it means having to do something you normally wouldn't (I hate auction sites as well and had never used Yahoo Auctions before deciding I was going to contribute.):)

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  • 6 months later...

 

To bump my own thread, just this afternoon, at a local thrift shop, I purchased two (unscanned) issues of the Official PlayStation Magazine from 2004 (for Cdn$.99 each, about US$.72). I also purchased an issue of EGM (already scanned)  and I passed on an issue of GamePro (also already scanned) and some issues of an Xbox magazine (about which I do not care).  

 

Alas, the magazine pages are too big to fit my current flatbed scanner, but at last I can finally join the august ranks of those members with issues waiting to be scanned. 🤔

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