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Monday 15 August 2011

James Hyman - Magazine Archive

A few weeks ago I was invited down to check out James Hyman's magazine archive. Didn't really know what to expect, probably lots of surplus magazines you see up in Clerkenwell on a Thursday afternoon or something. I COULDN'T HAVE BEEN MORE WRONG!

I walked into an open warehouse storage unit to at least 50,000 magazines piled high and getting sorted into alphabetical order. The girls had a giant task ahead of them so I left them to it and got stuck in. This wasn't like a kid in a sweet shop this was like a virgin 16 year old boy in the Playboy mansion. I literally didn't know where to look and what to pick up and fondle.


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James Hyman began his career at MTV in 1988 when Acid House was dominating the UK scene. From here he was involved in all aspects of the running and programming of MTV Europe, he also began collecting cultural magazines and by 2000 he had amassed over 1 million magazines.

James has decided its time for the world to see the biggest personal collection of cultural magazines on the planet.


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In many cases James owns issue 1 to present day. I was there for 2 hours and didn't even get passed 10% of the collection. This is something lots of people can relate to, we all have a collection of favourite magazines but this is on some beyond OCD level. Lots of the magazines are still in their original plastic sleeves unopened. If a publication released two covers for an issue James would buy both. If there was a selection of different freebies then James would buy them all. Imagine owning every issue of Andy Warhol's 'Interview' magazine. It's so large I've still not got my head around it!

Stay tuned to find out how you can access this collection.

3 comments:

Blane Anthony Chapman said...

HOLY SHIT! THIS LOOKS LIKE THE BEST LIBRARY EVER!

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Anonymous said...

he needs that shit scanned in and soon...or archived proper...amazed the damp or fire hasnt affected it. A true library of our culture...which is very culturally important...
or perhaps he should donate it to the British Library?

edi b said...

Paul Allen from Microsoft would love this collection....amazing to see it after all these years of impulsive collecting, structural OCD damage and A to Z copy warehousing .... what about the free mars bar limited edition with hairy growler magazine from Feb 1992 - how is that faring?