I have a copy of every magazine I've had work published it. Over the years, this means I've amassed a huge pile.
An office clearout last week saw this pile bundled up in plastic and moved to storage. It's pretty much cleared me out apart from the current years BRM and Garden Rail plus a folder of miscellaneous publications.
Nowadays, the need to keep old paper mags is much less. I have access to electronic versions of BR mand GR through Exact Editions. Thanks to the excellent search engine on this system, I can find anything I need to refer too and bring it up to read. If I simply want to know which edition of a mag I've written, the search on this blog is there to help - that's the main reason I post every time I'm in print.
Despite this, I still leaf through old mag every so often, Last week I wanted to check when a couple of models had hit the GR news and it was simpler to flick through the paper copies.
All this is a far cry from my days running websites. I have copies of the very first ones I ran on CD, but later Content Management Systems didn't allow me to save work in a recoverable form. All that is now long gone unless I look at the Wayback Machine and even this isn't that complete.
I wonder how those simply plonking their content on-line will feel when the only record is their memories?