Old classics magazines
Discussion
Noticed on ebay there seems to be a lot of people selling old issues of classic car and other motoring magazines, popular magazines like Practical Classics. Most of them are asking for anything from £5 upwards, yet the postage is,often about 9 quid. That much for a worn used classic car mag. Does anyone actually buy these?. Is there a collectable value to them?. I've got a dozen or so PC magazines going back to the mid 80s right up to the early-2000s, not all but quite a few in pretty decent nick. But I can't imagine anyone falling over themselves to snap them up if I tried to sell them.
Even club magazines come up on there.
Even club magazines come up on there.
If someone wants a particular issue, for an article, or maybe their car was featured, or they collect and have a gap they need to fill, then having that exact one presented to them on ebay makes it worth forking out a fiver. How else would you be able to get it? Autojumbles (petrol and entrance fee....), or hunting around (time....) , maybe on pistonheads for someone with a copy and willing to go to all the hassle of finding it in the pile, and posting it to you, for what? 20p?
On the flip side, if you've got a pile of 50 magazines.... scan through, write out the contents for the description, take a picture, set up all the parameters on eBay, deal with bidders, package and post. Out of that 50, you maybe will sell 3 or 4? That's a lot of work for £20 gross.
So there is a market, but its slow moving. When eBay first started in the UK about 2000/2001 I sold a load, because no one else was doing it, and american British car fans especially, found that pretty much the only way to get the magazines. But then people, with more free time than me, started doing it too, and profits and bites became smaller and less frequent.
£9 for postage is a piss take. They are quite heavy but that is unreasonable.
This is a great idea,
http://magazineexchange.co.uk/cw/
and if you want to get rid of your magazines you can put them on there. From my reading of it it looks like it's one off effort to post them and then sit back and wait for the purchases to come. Same as ebay but cheaper and with less effort.
On the flip side, if you've got a pile of 50 magazines.... scan through, write out the contents for the description, take a picture, set up all the parameters on eBay, deal with bidders, package and post. Out of that 50, you maybe will sell 3 or 4? That's a lot of work for £20 gross.
So there is a market, but its slow moving. When eBay first started in the UK about 2000/2001 I sold a load, because no one else was doing it, and american British car fans especially, found that pretty much the only way to get the magazines. But then people, with more free time than me, started doing it too, and profits and bites became smaller and less frequent.
£9 for postage is a piss take. They are quite heavy but that is unreasonable.
This is a great idea,
http://magazineexchange.co.uk/cw/
and if you want to get rid of your magazines you can put them on there. From my reading of it it looks like it's one off effort to post them and then sit back and wait for the purchases to come. Same as ebay but cheaper and with less effort.
Jukebag said:
Noticed on ebay there seems to be a lot of people selling old issues of classic car and other motoring magazines
I think you mean " a lot of people listing old issues of classic car...". I think it's because it's easier to list for no fee now, so there's nothing to be lost in sticking them one and filling up the listings to make it more difficult to find what you're actually looking for. I used to get some magazines early as we advertised in them, I tried listing a couple once when they still hadn't arrived in the newsagents, far below cover price, but got no interest at all. And postage took them back up to almost cover price anyway.
I have loads and loads of car magazines, and there's pretty much no chance of finding anyone to buy them, best I can do is run through them and make sure there's nothing I want in them, then pass them on to someone else who might read them. For some reason I'm reluctant to pass them to someone who might sell them, and charity shops (the one exception to that) don't seem to want magazines.
I used to think it was a lot of effort for not much reward but I was looking for a particular magazine one evening and I noticed this seller had over 20'000 magazines listed. I looked at his feedback for the last month and he had sold over 750 magazines which had an average price of £6 to £7. I also saw at a farm sale one day a pallet load of old motoring magazines which sold for around £50. I didn't realise at the time it was a friends cousin who bought them. I heard a few years later that he had paid for a family holiday to Australia with the proceeds!
About 15 years ago I had a clear out of my magazines: Classic Cars, Classic + Sports Car etc etc. I had had full years of them...all through the 80's and 90. I took a stall at an event at Brooklands Museum. ..i priced them all at £1 for a full years worth. I didn't sell any. The week after they all went to the recycling centre.
Somewhere I have T&CC from the first issue (Oct 73) through to 2001 missing only half a dozen from 89-90. I'm sure I remember that issue 1 was selling for well over £100 back in the mid-70s. I doubt there's any interest in them whatsoever now, so it looks like my retirement fund hasn't performed too well over the last several decades !
gothatway said:
Somewhere I have T&CC from the first issue (Oct 73) through to 2001 missing only half a dozen from 89-90. I'm sure I remember that issue 1 was selling for well over £100 back in the mid-70s. I doubt there's any interest in them whatsoever now, so it looks like my retirement fund hasn't performed too well over the last several decades !
Incomplete set, that's why!Which ones are you missing? I could probably sort you out.
I'd have snapped up a year's worth of those magazines for £1, easily
. Pity the ones on eBay aren't being sold for that. £5 for one issue of an old classic mag, plus £9 postage is ridiculous (I agree 9 quid is a p***take, no way would it cost that much unless it was a really huge lot).
As I said, even club mags like The E-Type Club and Jaguar Enthusiast are on eBay, often for around the same amount, even alot more in some cases. If you think 5 quid is extreme for a worn vintage car mag, then you should check out all the old Radio and TV Times magazines that are on there. I've seen some that are about 70 quid lol.
. Pity the ones on eBay aren't being sold for that. £5 for one issue of an old classic mag, plus £9 postage is ridiculous (I agree 9 quid is a p***take, no way would it cost that much unless it was a really huge lot). As I said, even club mags like The E-Type Club and Jaguar Enthusiast are on eBay, often for around the same amount, even alot more in some cases. If you think 5 quid is extreme for a worn vintage car mag, then you should check out all the old Radio and TV Times magazines that are on there. I've seen some that are about 70 quid lol.
Stigproducts said:
gothatway said:
Somewhere I have T&CC from the first issue (Oct 73) through to 2001 missing only half a dozen from 89-90. I'm sure I remember that issue 1 was selling for well over £100 back in the mid-70s. I doubt there's any interest in them whatsoever now, so it looks like my retirement fund hasn't performed too well over the last several decades !
Incomplete set, that's why!Which ones are you missing? I could probably sort you out.
Jukebag said:
I'd have snapped up a year's worth of those magazines for £1, easily.
And me. That's the problem. Looking through a pile of "National Geographic" last summer at a car boot sale, determined not to buy them no matter how interesting some of the pieces in there can be, until the stall holder said "you can have the lot for 50p". .Stigproducts said:
This is a great idea,
http://magazineexchange.co.uk/cw/
and if you want to get rid of your magazines you can put them on there. From my reading of it it looks like it's one off effort to post them and then sit back and wait for the purchases to come. Same as ebay but cheaper and with less effort.
Thanks for that, I might give that a go and see if it gets me anywhere.http://magazineexchange.co.uk/cw/
and if you want to get rid of your magazines you can put them on there. From my reading of it it looks like it's one off effort to post them and then sit back and wait for the purchases to come. Same as ebay but cheaper and with less effort.
Its ashame so many of these old mags get thrown away because they can't sell them. And if you think thats a waste then think about the current issues that have been on the shelves of WhSmith etc that don't get sold. I've heard they just rip off the front cover and throw them away in a locked skip, so no-one can get free copies. They should give them away if they don't sell them.
There's a lot of good stuff in the old mags, and a nice way of looking at what the cars were going for back then and how many models were being sold whether privately or via a dealer (looking at the ones I have private sales seem far more common in the classifieds than today, particular with the likes of E-Types).
Would be nice if people would scan and archive them and upload them to a website or image hosting site as a pdf. Would be nice if people would also do the sane who have old copies of TV listings magazines instead of trying to flog a TV Times Charles and Diana Wedding 1982 special for 70 quid lol. Who's gonna pay that?. I heard Bob Monkhouse was an avid collector of that magazine having collected every single issue (mayve been Radio Times), I wonder what became of those after he died?, I bet they didn't get sold at a car boot for 50p. I bet he had the garage space for them though.
There's a lot of good stuff in the old mags, and a nice way of looking at what the cars were going for back then and how many models were being sold whether privately or via a dealer (looking at the ones I have private sales seem far more common in the classifieds than today, particular with the likes of E-Types).
Would be nice if people would scan and archive them and upload them to a website or image hosting site as a pdf. Would be nice if people would also do the sane who have old copies of TV listings magazines instead of trying to flog a TV Times Charles and Diana Wedding 1982 special for 70 quid lol. Who's gonna pay that?. I heard Bob Monkhouse was an avid collector of that magazine having collected every single issue (mayve been Radio Times), I wonder what became of those after he died?, I bet they didn't get sold at a car boot for 50p. I bet he had the garage space for them though
.Edited by Jukebag on Tuesday 29th January 13:07
Edited by Jukebag on Tuesday 29th January 13:10
I used to keep 3 magazines per month: Car, Classic Car and Classic and Sports Car. Kept them all for about 20 years. Made special shelves in attic "office" etc.
Idea was that I would dip into them as a particular classic car caught my fancy, read the buyers guide or read a test comparing it to rivals etc. Make decision. Buy or not buy car.
In practice I found the classic magazines dated very quickly, prices, dealers, clubs and suppliers changed. Parts which were unobtainable were remanufactured etc. To be honest, they were killed by the internet which gave similar information very quickly.
Also the classic magazines tended to paint all of them with a very positive brush. What had been drawbacks had apparently become "character" etc.
So I kept the Car magazines and still do. I do like looking back to see what was the best of the group 20 years ago, then I use the internet to decide if I should buy one.
Idea was that I would dip into them as a particular classic car caught my fancy, read the buyers guide or read a test comparing it to rivals etc. Make decision. Buy or not buy car.
In practice I found the classic magazines dated very quickly, prices, dealers, clubs and suppliers changed. Parts which were unobtainable were remanufactured etc. To be honest, they were killed by the internet which gave similar information very quickly.
Also the classic magazines tended to paint all of them with a very positive brush. What had been drawbacks had apparently become "character" etc.
So I kept the Car magazines and still do. I do like looking back to see what was the best of the group 20 years ago, then I use the internet to decide if I should buy one.
Jukebag said:
Would be nice if people would scan and archive them and upload them to a website or image hosting site as a pdf.
Please don't give me any more justification for keeping the stacks of magazines - that's a very good idea, and one I have thought of before*. I seem to recall that on one of the "hoarders" programmes where a chap was climbing over piles of his newspapers to get to other rooms in his house, that was one of the reasons he gave for keeping them. (* Heck of a job, though. I tried scanning one of our old club magazines, around 40 sides of A4, and it takes longer than I was hoping. As part of the interest in magazines [for me, at least] is the adverts, it's not like I could miss those out to save time and space)
Edited by droopsnoot on Tuesday 29th January 19:15
Or a quicker way may be to use a decent spec camera that is fast and has good resolution (like a DSLR) and photograph each page. The DSLR I have (a Nikon D40, only 6 megapixels but it takes superb shots) is very quick and so photographing a whole magazine (as long as it's readable when zoomed in, in focus etc) shouldn't take too long, much quicker than having to scan them IMO. Then upload them to your computer, crop them if needed and save them.
. Sadly, I have been updating a database of registration numbers of vehicles that appear in old car magazines before I get rid of the magazines. I add them if they're in an article, a photo or if they're in a "for sale" ad and I can clearly read the registration. I figured it might be interesting for owners of those cars to know where they've been.
The DSLR is a good idea, except that a reasonable DSLR image is quite big, and by the time you've combined them all together to make a PDF that becomes a really big PDF file, so they need to be re-sized down to something manageable first. I've got a quick resizer program, so I guess I could give it a go and see how much time and space it takes for something I've got lying around. It does get around some magazines being slightly bigger than a standard A4 scanner, as well.
The DSLR is a good idea, except that a reasonable DSLR image is quite big, and by the time you've combined them all together to make a PDF that becomes a really big PDF file, so they need to be re-sized down to something manageable first. I've got a quick resizer program, so I guess I could give it a go and see how much time and space it takes for something I've got lying around. It does get around some magazines being slightly bigger than a standard A4 scanner, as well.
Edited by droopsnoot on Wednesday 30th January 11:50
Only just realised, after browsing through an Aug 99 issue of PC magazine, there is a feature where they go to Liverpool to do a photoshoot using a Beetle and a S2 E-Type roadster. It's the same E-Type I saw in New Brighton on the Wirral in 2016.
Nice to see it's still in the area after all those years, unless it's swapped owners up and down the country and has come back. I wonder how many resprays and rebuilds it's had since then.
And in Sept 2016, New Brighton.
Nice to see it's still in the area after all those years, unless it's swapped owners up and down the country and has come back. I wonder how many resprays and rebuilds it's had since then.
And in Sept 2016, New Brighton.
Edited by Jukebag on Thursday 31st January 10:56
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