Quote Originally Posted by Frank S View Post
He passed in 2000. Born in 1923, WWII vet Omaha beach survivor Had a collection of every issue of Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Science and Mechanics, Mechanics illustrated from their very first issue through 4 years after his death. In his vast library of collected and subscribed magazines there were possibly tens of thousands of magazines all trades and scientific related, like The electrical experimenter, Modern Mechanix and so many others It would be impossible for me to remember all of them. My cousins and I would go up into his attic library to read them whenever possible, So Uncle decided that if we were going to read through them then we should catalog them by year and make covers to store them in. They lived 2 miles away from where I lived so I had to either walk or if it wasn't too muddy or sandy road my bicycle to his house later my motorcycle, We spent years of our spare time arranging some order to that vast collection, I doubt if it ever was completed I can't say about them but I must have skim read 100's of thousands of different articles over the years
Sounds like a great guy. You were privileged to have someone like that close to you! My dad had a smallish collection of Popular Mechanics, and Popular electronics, and a larger collection of American Rifleman. I was in hog heaven with them, and a regular visitor to the library. A lot of those old magazines are available to read online, now. Many of them can be downloaded, too, so I've got a pretty good digital collection of such material. I'm kind of sensitive to the weight and fragility of paper books, though I love them very much. When we had to move from our "homestead" in NW Florida, the folks that advised me how to pack my stuff told me to put all the magazines at the front of the mobile home, and then proceeded to rip the tongue off. Cost me $500 (in 1986) to have it welded back on. And when I got here to Oklahoma, I had about 80 1.5cuft book cartons, and a flood in the back room took out about half of them. 40 cartons of books. I'm still trying to replace some of them. A lot of them were fiction, but there were some great how-to books and technical books, too. I've got 465GB of books and magazines on my 10.5" Samsung tablet, which is very readable. About the same on my phone and more on the desktop computer. What I want is the entire Library of Congress, but can't afford that yet.

Bill