Don't sort them by logo, put them in number order!

Yesterday evening turned out to be one of the more unusual evenings in our house. It all started when Steve asked a dangerous question "Where are the Classic Comics with The Tides of Time in them?"
"Well," I replied" somewhere in there," pointing at the full filing cabinet.

Ten minutes later they hadn't turned up, so I duly found myself offering to go into the loft to see if they were in the stash of magazines that were sitting in a box up there. They weren't. Oh no! That'd have been far too easy.

So, within minutes of that, I had the bright idea of pulling all the magazines out of the cabinet, all the magazines out of the files on top and soon they were strewn all over the living room floor. "Hmm," said Steve, " We have a lot of magazines."
"It's true," I said in agreement.

Then I had the bright idea of doing what we should have done along time ago, sorting them all out. Oh yes, a stroke of brilliance that, so that next time Steve wanted issue 173 of Doctor Who Magazine, or the issues of Classic Comics with The Tides of Time in them, we'd know exactly where to look.

It took the rest of the evening.

Steve went out for fish'n'chips for dinner, we ate them (they were extra good last night) and then got back to the sorting. Steve had the good idea of making piles of 50 each, which was good, better probably then my frankly insane idea of sorting them by logo (well it seemed like a good idea for a while, honest), and soon there were 7 piles of various sizes of Doctor Who Magazines waiting to be put into order.

Then we catalogued them to see what was missing. Oh yes, I've been waiting to do a definitive list for a while. There was a panicky moment at one point when most of the 170s and 180s were missing (the output of 1991-92) but it turned out they were all under the footstool and had been missed! All in all, there are 13 issues of Doctor Who Magazine that we haven't got, which is better than I thought, and of those only one issue that I've owned at some point has disappeared, number 86 from 1984, which considering how many times the collection has been moved since I started it in 1980 is pretty good going I reckon. A few have lost their covers, the early 50's, no 60, no 79 and 127, but you know, by and large the collection is in pretty good condition considering how well read they've been!

And now we've ordered most of the missing ones from ebay, so it might not be 13 for very much longer!

Then I started on the fanzines... There are still many of them, but I did throw a few more away!