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Ask Amanda Lee: How to Store Magazines

amanda_lee — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 21:29:44 +0000

“You should do a post on how to organize magazines. I’m drowning in them.”
-Cait, Cincinnati, Ohio

If you’ve been reading for awhile, you know my feelings on paper. I have an inherent predilection for clutter, which means that I have to work extra-hard to keep it out of my space – and the best way to do this, the way that requires as few decisions as possible, means letting as little paper as possible into my home and space.

Given this anti-clutter rule, normally if I were giving advice to a friend who had a magazine addiction, I might suggest that they look at why the magazines keep coming into their home. Are you actually reading them? Do you refer back to them often, or are you just keeping them because you like having a complete set? Would you consider subscribing online? In short, is there any way to get the information without allowing them into your space at all?

However, I know Cait really well, and I’m pretty intimately acquainted with her work/personal situation. She’s a writer by profession, covering cooking, decor, gardening, organization, and holiday parties, among other things, for a pretty highly trafficked home and garden site. As such, she [along with the rest of her editorial team] frequently references old issues of home decor magazines for information on various topics – so often that getting rid of the entire collection would increase her workload and make it difficult to communicate with her teammates about which issue, which page, which editorial spread to reference.

SO. Here’s what I propose you do if you’re in Cait’s situation, where you want to organize your magazines without getting rid of the whole lot of them.

Separate the magazines into two piles. One pile will consist of the magazines you want to keep in their entirety, and the other will be the magazines you might have kept for just an article or two, but don’t need the entire book. Leave the latter for a little while; we’ll come back to it later.
Pick up some cardboard magazine files. a package of a dozen. This is where your full-issue magazines are going to go.You’ll need at least one file for every year’s worth of every title – so if you have four years of Real Simple, three of Bust and five of Sassy, you’ll need twelve magazine files. [Also, if you have any number of years' worth of Sassy, you need to get in touch with me, because clearly we were meant to be besties.] Some larger magazines, the ones whose issues run over 700 pages a month, will require more than one file per year. Make sure you get enough for your collection to expand, too.
Make them fancy! Apartment Therapy wrote a great post a couple years back about how to customize your cardboard magazine files. They used pretty hard-to-find and expensive materials like book cloth and rubber brayers, but you can probably achieve a similar result with brushes and regular fabric or sticky-backed paper with a cool print.
Sort the magazines by year and by title. You can color-code them if you’re organizationally inclined. Don’t forget to print pretty labels so you know which title/year you’re looking at. Easy enough, right?
Now go back to your pile of keeping-a-few-pages magazines. Cut out the pages you want to keep with an Xacto or a rotary cutter.You can either save the entire page by cutting along the spine, or you can cut out the text of the article itself. Do whatever you like.
Fill a three-ring binder [or four] with clear plastic page-protector sleeves.
Slip the articles into the sleeves. Each of these sleeves should hold one article. You can group them with tabbed dividers according to topic, year, publication title, or author, or you can separate them into different binders for each topic/year/author/title. Label each article neatly in case you ever have to cite it as a source.
Extra for experts: Scan the whole lot of it and upload it to Evernote or some kind of text-recognition/document management software. This can be time-consuming, but it’s well worth it. I don’t have a scanner of my own, but I hear awesome things about the a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000WJCX18?ie=UTF8&tag=amandaledotor-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000WJCX18″>ScanSnap line from Fujitsu; and I love everything about Evernote. After you’ve scanned them all, the text recognition software makes it easy to find that turkey recipe you remember from last year, all the stories on decorative shelving, or the brand of that awesome bedding set that was featured in last month’s Real Simple – immediately. After you’ve scanned every bit of every magazine, you can decide whether to keep them for aesthetics, but then you have a backup if you lose an issue.
A final general rule: You should only ever keep what you can store reasonably. If Cait’s magazine collection started creeping out of her office and into the kitchen, bedroom, living room, or dog crate, I’d probably advise her to scan the older years and get rid of them, or take them to her office where her editorial team could use them too.

How do you store your magazines? Do you have any other tips?

An Announcement

amanda_lee — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:04:28 +0000

[source]

It’s been silent around here for the past couple of days, and I’m sorry. I’m amidst a launch of a big project at work, sometimes putting in almost seventy hours a week between my office and my other job…and it’s catching up with me. So hold tight. I’ll be right back with you later this weekend. If you need your Amanda Lee fix before then, you know where to find me.

Much love, kids. I’ll see you soon.

Sunday Survey: 1.31.2010 [Ask Amanda Lee!]

amanda_lee — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 01:40:26 +0000

What do you want to know about me? I want to write an occasional column where I answer your questions—about knitting, sewing, design, blogging, Cincinnati, New York, organization…you name it. So ask away. You know you want to.

What I’ve Been Up To

amanda_lee — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 02:18:12 +0000

You already know about my Tumblr. Did you know I also have a Last.fm account? Add me. We’ll make beautiful music together.

I appeared on the cover of The Minor Leagues‘ new album, forthcoming this fall. It involved a lot of coffee, one rainy night in Northern Kentucky, and a ton of diner food. Check it.

Also, I heard a rumor someplace that I might be playing a show with band of same name at the upcoming Midpoint Music Festival. Which I’ll also be blogging from. Are you in the midwest? Planning on stopping by? Drop a line; we’ll get a coffee.

I’ve joined the staff of Above the Fray as a contributing editor. Wooo! I met Kelsey last February during Fashion Week, and she’s been working on the magazine for over a year now, so she’s my mentor-in-chief right now, and we’re going to do awesome things.

I’m writing about music for Almost Four Stars, a job that involves a track review posted every day at 12:12 p.m.. Check it at your lunch break and listen to what I’m loving. Also, it’s probably in your best interest to read this debate that my editor and I had about Passion Pit, which got more flames than this entire blog. There’s no such thing as bad traffic, right?

I’m workin on a new project with Chris involving cohabitation, rules, and all kinds of passive aggression. Keep a lookout; it’s worth living by.

Also, Chris is blogging. Follow him; he’s super-talented.

Jay is visiting as I type. Between his regular posting schedule at DLS, Suicide Girls, and Task.fm, he’s loving Cincinnati, loving my roommates, loving my friends, and loving the lack of sleep deprivation, since he’s bunking with a self-proclaimed nap addict. Mutual outfit pics are forthcoming.

Kiddos, how’s your summer been? Anything epic happen to you recently?

No related posts.

A Reiteration: Why Fashion Is Important

amanda_lee — Thu, 28 May 2009 02:24:35 +0000

I’ve touched on this before in one of my Inspiration posts, but then a couple weeks ago this happened on Britain’s Got Talent. And I think given that, it bears repeating.

How you look matters, people. And since we’re not always at liberty to change our own height, weight, bone structure, skin condition, or disability, nor is any one of us going to completely change the mindset and habits of immediate judgment inherent in every human being on the planet, the fact that it matters isn’t going away anytime soon.

And because of all this,fashion matters, too. What you wear is the only capacity in which on a daily basis you make decisions that communicate who you are, what you value, and how you feel. Obviously, every decision you make communicates those things, but think about it—does anything change as frequently or vary as much as the things you choose to wear?

Think about it. Your fashion choices demonstrate how you want people to perceive you—are you hiptastic, or do you have other things to worry about? Do you take your professional ambitions seriously, or do you have any at all? Are you confident, meek, sexual, reserved, wealthy, poor, individualistic, or a trend-follower?

What’s more, what you wear demonstrates how you perceive yourself. Do you feel good about your body, or do you dress to hide your so-called problem areas?

Fashion is a key showcase of your consumption choices and thus, your values. Do you go crazy for trends, or do you look for pieces that can be worn over and over again ten years from now? Do you pick out disposable pieces, or do you buy for lasting quality? Are you a green shopper? How does child labor and third-world manufacturing affect your buying decisions? No matter what your values are, they’re evident in what you wear. When I see a girl wearing skinny stonewashed jeans, for instance, I can tell she places a high value on current trends. Someone wearing head-to-toe organic cotton clothing and TOMS shoes likely values the environment and economic charity at least as much as fashion-forwardness. New Yorkers (or tourists!) who wear sneakers instead of heels definitely value their own comfort over their trendiness.

Also, think about it this way: it’s impossible to dress in a way that communicates absolutely nothing about you. If you dress as though you don’t care, the people around you might not be able to see how interesting and unique you are—less able than, say, if you wore your favorite colors or styles every day. If you follow a uniform code to the very letter, you’re still communicating something about yourself—your affiliation with the organization whose uniform you’re wearing [and also perhaps your loyalty to it—that you value the organization you belong to more than you value your individual expression, or maybe just that you value your job enough to follow the rules and thus not be stripped of it]. Likewise, if you choose not to wear anything, you’re making a pretty specific statement about your values and your feelings about your own body! And if you go really grungy (read: you skip on teeth-brushing and shampoo once a week at most; you wait six months or so before doing your laundry; and every item of clothing you own is stained, stretched out, and torn), you’re being unabashedly honest about the fact that you don’t give a damn about what you look like [or what anyone thinks of it].

[Sidenote: I used to know someone like this. And I'm not entirely sure how he held a job or met anyone, because he looked a hot mess all the time. I'm not talking about wearing clothing that was out of style or unflattering…I'm talking about holey, smelly, unlaundered clothing paired with once-weekly showers, if he was feeling super-motivated. Ew.]

So don’t ever let anyone tell you that fashion is dumb. It’s not.

Ask Amanda Lee #1: The Origins of My Name

amanda_lee — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:50:21 +0000

“Is Amanda Lee your real name? Why is your name Amanda Lee and not just Amanda? Can I call you Amanda?”

Yes, Amanda Lee is my real name. That is what it says on my driver’s license and my birth certificate. I used to go by Amanda when I was younger and didn’t know as many people…but did you know that Amanda was the sixth most popular baby name in the year that I was born? And that there are approximately 75,310 (editor’s note: this is an exaggeration, albeit only a slight one) Amandas in New York at any given time? And that at one time, my immediate circle included two close friends, two cousins, and at least one coworker with Amanda as a first name? With stats like these, I was running into Amandas everywhere. I had to distinguish myself, even if only for workplace and social logistics. And I really don’t have to tell you that it was way easier to get AmandaLee.org than to get Amanda.org (or .com, or .net, or whatever).

As for whether you can call me Amanda…well, you can. My dad still slips up and does it, as do many of my Facebook friends who knew me in high school (when I was the only Amanda around). But I’ll probably correct you gently. After all, if someone introduced themself as Jennifer or Robert, you wouldn’t automatically start calling them Jen or Rob, would you?

Darling readers, what are the origins of your names? Do you use your real name as your online identity? Have you ever undergone a name change? How did it work out?