A Requiem for Magazines

 

When I went out to look for the Vanity Fair with the article on Cormac McCarthy and the girl he loved, I was certain I wouldn’t find that issue in a bookstore. Anyone who had ever heard of this writer, or saw a movie adaption of one of his novels, or had read even a portion of his impressive body of work, would have snagged a copy of this magazine the second it hit the stands. In a city as literary as Seattle claims to be, I knew better than to expect to find it in Elliott Bay Books or the University Bookstore.

My best bet was probably Hudson News at the airport but because I enjoy a good quest, I decided to take to the rails. The light rail runs between a branch of Barnes & Noble and the airport with those two bookstores located on stops along the way. I could make this a tiny journey and hit all four of these destinations if necessary. I was only sorry that three other primary bookstores weren’t on my route.

It’s a dispiriting trudge from the light rail station to one of the few surviving Barnes & Nobles in this city. It was once in the middle of a shopping center that surrounded a large mall but when the mall died, so did most of its satellite stores. Plans for a park, a sports center, and apartment buildings all halted during covid, leaving fenced-off construction sites that are still empty. It’s a shrine to dystopia with a smattering of chain restaurants and stores that are more depressing than the lunar landscapes of vacant ground.

Barnes & Noble lies near the end of this eerie stroll and it was almost cheering to walk into its light and warmth. Its fame is partially because of its immense selection of magazines and I began to make my way through the looming array of shelves that displayed hundreds of periodicals, catering to every conceivable interest. On one of the last was a double display of Vanity Fair--from the month before. Since we’re now midway through November, finding the October issue in this bailiwick of print was almost as depressing as the area that surrounded it.

Back on the train, I got off at the stop near the University Bookstore and braced myself for more disappointment. This store had been redefining itself and I wasn’t at all sure that they still carried magazines. But there gleaming front and center with Vogue and its counterparts was the magazine I was looking for, which should have restored my faith in human literacy.

But it didn’t. That bookstore serves a large university with a flourishing department of English. It’s been in place for over a century and has a highly literate customer base that is devoted to it. Back when I was still a bookseller, that sort of issue would sell out immediately and we often had trouble reordering it because the same thing happened at bookstores across Seattle. By rights I should never have found what I wanted on that shelf, in this place.

I’m a dinosaur. So is the friend who told me about this article. So are the scant number of surviving magazine stands that lurk in a few bookstores and in airports.

Many of the newer, smaller bookshops don’t carry magazines. The supermarkets and drugstores that still have magazine racks fill them with the cheap, poorly produced variety that have proliferated in the recent past. There is no place in downtown Seattle where I can buy Vanity Fair, or the Atlantic, or the September issue of Vogue. 

I grew up in a house where five different magazines arrived in the mail. I receive one that once was weekly and now comes twice a month, because I’m hopelessly addicted to the smart, snarky journalism of New York Magazine. I used to buy fashion magazines from a stand to cheer me up in the depths of winter and the Atlantic when I felt I could afford it. Now a copy of Vanity Fair is as expensive as the Atlantic or the New Yorker used to be--god knows what a magazine worth reading costs now. 

My desire to read literary gossip cost me eleven dollars. For just a bit more, I could have bought a book that would have sustained me for a few hours, not the matter of minutes that it took to read a badly written article.

No wonder magazine readers have taken to the internet for what they once held in their hands. Next time I may just pay for online access. After all if it’s good enough for the New York Times and the Washington Post, it’s certainly good enough for Vanity Fair.