[48864w6ui]

It used to be standard practice, at the end of a year, to cut all the ads out of that year's issues and bind them in a single hardback volume.

Now historians realize that often the ads may be more interesting than the articles.

[FredPret]

I remember reading Scientific American magazines in my local library in the third world as a kid.

I was blown away by the ads.

From useless gadgets that will probably be fun for an hour or two only to very expensive ones aimed at people with clearly a ton of disposable income.

Lawnmowers you can ride on?! A thing just to detect rings in the sand? How rich are these people? A watch that sets itself to an atomic clock? An astronaut pen that writes underwater? Telescopes in your back yard?!

The sheer volume and variety of ads told me that the economy of that place was in a totally different league from my own.

[pjmlp]

I have the same feeling on my twitter feed.

[bcraven]

Sorry, standard practice by whom, and issues of what?

[0xEF]

I think the other reply is referring to folks who collect and sell old magazines. I can only speak from second-hand experience, though, as I knew a person who used to do this. When eBay was just getting started, she was collecting old magazines and trimming the ads from them, then selling them as a lower bulk collection (she also took jeans with holes in them, patched them with colorful fabric and resold them on early eBay but different story).

I don't know why this was a thing, but I remember her telling me she got the idea from a local library that preserved its periodicals, so maybe it started at libraries. Personally, were I to collect magazines, I would want the ads intact. Not because I love adverts (quite the opposite, actually), but my collector brain's notion of preserving a thing in its original state is at odds with the idea of removing the ads.

[RobotToaster]

I assume he means things like the Strand Magazine, that Sherlock Holmes was first published in, it's not unusual to find copies bound into hardback books like that.

[pyuser583]

Definitely the case with my old comics.

I can get the comics on Kindle. But the ads for Arachnophobia are priceless.