Read My Magazines!

I am a reader of magazines, feeling bad about the future when they will be only on the computer screen.  I don’t mind reading books on my Kindle, like it even, but I don’t like reading magazines on my Kindle, although my Kindle is not the kind, I think, that reads magazines or newspapers.  Maybe I could learn to like it, but I have tried reading them on my computer screen and I just don’t like it.  It’s tiresome, and a magazine you have subscribed to by choice is rarely tiresome.  (Although The Atlantic has become so, except for James Fallows.)

Here in beautiful downtown Point Roberts, we have no book store with a terrific magazine rack so if you are a magazine fan you may have actually to subscribe.  I subscribe to The New Yorker and Harpers and Washington Monthly and Mother Jones and, up until next month, to Foreign Affairs which has turned out to be too dull even for me.  Actually, if you subscribe to The New Yorker you really don’t need to subscribe to anything else because it comes about 50 of 52 weeks each year and there is always one on the table that you haven’t read.  We have boxes of New Yorkers from the 80’s that we didn’t have time to read during our working days and that we brought with us when we moved up here, but the current New Yorkers are keeping us too busy to work on the backlog.  The New Yorker will sell you an external drive that has every New Yorker ever published.  I plan to be buried with this drive so that I will always have something to read.

Up until this week, I have taken my completely-read New Yorkers and Harpers and all the rest over to the Community Center where, in the hall outside the library, a couple of boxes sit on a bench.  This is the magazine exchange and you can put your magazines there when you are through with them and somebody else will take them.  I’m in and out of that hallway and I’ve never seen my New Yorkers sit there for long.  Sometimes they are gone just in the time that I am inside the library checking out a book.  This is a great recycling/exchange/community service. 

I  occasionally take a magazine, but mostly I am a leaver of New Yorkers.  I take few magazines from the boxes largely because I am trying to keep up with those New Yorkers.  Today, when I went to drop off one New Yorker and one Harpers, a sign informed me that my magazines were not to be left there and if I wanted to donate material to the library, I should talk to the librarian.  But I never thought I was donating “material to the library.”  I was recycling magazines with my fellow readers/residents.

In the library, I spoke to the head librarian who told me that this new policy had nothing to do with the library but was, in fact, a decision by the Parks Board, a group of five whom we elect and whose job it is to care for the Community Center and some of the parks around.  This is what passes for local government here, as almost all the rest of our government is located down in Bellingham with the County.

While discussing this unfortunate turn of events with the librarian, I noticed that one of the members of the Parks Board was in fact sitting at a nearby computer.  ‘What’s the deal?’ I asked.  He mumbled on about the cost of recycling old magazines and the fact that the boxes were not tidy.  People, apparently, left magazines on the benches and then the magazines flung themselves on the floor. ‘It is,’ he concluded, ‘An aesthetic issue.’

Well, perhaps the five members of the Parks Board are particularly highly qualified to make aesthetic decisions and perhaps we were well-briefed on their aesthetic theories before we voted for them.  Nevertheless, I think they might have asked those of us who use the magazine exchange about the value of this service and how that service weighed when placed on the balance scale with their aesthetics.  Or might even have come to the community and suggested that maybe we needed to think about another way to handle the magazine exchange. Point-Interface would be a particularly good place to leave such a message, to begin such a dialogue.  It seems just a tad high-handed voting in this new policy without any community discussion.  We have time here.

Now, in Los Angeles, nobody is going to discuss something like abolishing a magazine exchange at a local library with the community.  That’s the whole thing about living even in a moderate-sized city.  But in a place with only 1400 or so residents, perhaps some more respect could be shown to the residents from the government.   

Magazine subscribers and exchangers, Unite!  At the very least, we could all go to the next Parks Board meeting and exchange our magazines while they work through their agenda.