The Last Days of Print

My love of magazines started in my pre teen years at the rump end of africa where things took months to arrive. By my teen years I was devouring them at such a rate I took to buying up old copies of car magazines from school fetes and second hand shops. I enjoyed the articles and adverts in equal amounts and would read car the car stats at the back so often , if there had ever been a car themed Trivial Pursuit I am sure you would have been hard pressed to find a Grand(er) Poohbah of car statistics than precocious sixteen year old me.

While books are a valuable resource, they are a static snapshot of information at the time of publishing. Some information never ages but the world of cars and architecture changes rapidly and throughout my university years studying architecture, my sizeable drawing board was always piled high with bound periodicals from the library to the extent that in modern times it would have been candy taped off and the Health and Safety Executive notified.

Roll forward a decade or two and my flat as a newly qualified graduate architect had a dedicated wall of bookcases filled with magazines, extortionately priced design books to the point where the bookcases had to be rawl bolted to the brickwork lest they succumb to gravity burying an inquisitive but careless visitor.

These days the garage is filled with Porsches and the library wall is filled with Porsche magazines the oldest of which dates from 1961. What fascination could they possibly hold that the internet could not? Well, it is is simple. I can pick up a 2002 magazine and read about my 2002 C4S in the context of 2002; what they thought at the time, how it drove, is it better than the then current M5? Equally, I get insights into far flung events across the world from the latest magazines, some of which are added to the bucket list and others firmly crossed off.

I must confess my ideal holiday strangely, is not a Porsche based one, it is up a mountain or in the woods, with little 4G connections with a pile of magazines and a few books. No work, no phone, no youtube and few interruptions. Sunsets, dust, insect bites, true silence, and a time for reflection. What draws us back to the real world in the south east of England is the prospect of a road trip in one of the Porsches. As I write this, my bag is packed and ready for the off tomorrow at dawn to chase fellow LTL columnist Andy across Europe to Luftgekuhlt in Copenhagen.

Earlier this week I was a thousand miles away sitting on a mountain, cycling and reading the latest Total 911 and nursing sunburn. Reality hits when you realise you have less than 48 hours to remove the grime of the Ireland road trip which still cakes the wheels and body with the addition of paw prints and dust from the adjacent freshly harvested barley field that has infiltrated the garage door.

While I have not written this column for very long, it has given me the opportunity to tick the box of ‘write for a magazine’ and for that I am grateful to both Total 911 and Editor Lee for that opportunity to fulfil that dream.