Magazine Hell, I Need to Organize this Mess

Living in Japan has caused a problem for me — I own a lot of magazines. A lot. To the point that I just don’t have the space for them anymore. The best way to clean up the mess was to simply clip away at the magazines. When I lived back home, I never clipped my magazines because of how much it cost to import them but now that I live in Japan, the cost of them aren’t 3x the face value of the magazine which makes throwing them away a whole lot easier.

Magazines in Japan come in different shapes and sizes, some even exclusive to Japan. When organizing your magazines, this can be a problem — and sometimes even costly if the magazine is not a standard A4 size. I’m writing this entry to give a how to on how to clip your magazines, organize them, and what tools you need to store them.

What you need is:

• a crap ton of magazines,
• binders (one that can hold A4 and A4変形 sheets),
• extra A4/A4変形 clear pockets,
• a pen/pencil (pencil preferred),
• post-it notes,
• a box/paper cutter

The Differences in Magazines

As  I explained, there’s many different types of magazines but there’s only two that you’ll find commonly everywhere: A4 and A4変形 (henkei). A4 Henkei is a Japan-only paper size that most of your fashion/industry magazines come in. They are the same height of A4 but are about 15cm wider. When it comes down to filing, the biggest problem one will run into is trying to find clear pockets and binders that can hold A4 henkei sheets. From my personal experience, I’ve only been able to find A4 henkei clear pocket books at a store called Muji, located about 35 minutes from my house for about 580 yen or an actual binder by King Jim that I can only purchase online for about 1700 yen, on sale. It’s originally 2200 yen.

The Muji A4 “Wide” Clearfile can be found here.

The King Jim Magazine Binder can be found here.

The pocket inserts for the King Jim bounder can be found here

All links lead to Japanese websites. I believe Muji is in the States but I’m not sure about King Jim products. For those living abroad, just take the measurements for A4 henkei and try to find the closest alternative.

As you can see, there’s an obvious size difference between the magazines.

Here’s a chart of magazines I’ve had and their sizes:

• Oristar – A4 Henkei
• with – A4 Henkei
• AneCan – A4 Henkei
• CanCan – A4 Henkei
• Ray – A4 Henkei
• Clubism – A4 Henkei
• Nihon Eiga Magazine – A4 Henkei
• TV Fan Cross – A4
• TV Pia – A4
• TV Guide – A4
• The Television – A4
• TV Guide Persons – A4
• TV Guide Plus – A4
• The Television Colors – A4
• The Television ZOOM – A4
• Popolo – A4 Henkei
• Wink Up – B5(?, post 2010)
• Potato – A4 Henkei (post 2009)

Of course there’s a lot more but that’s the general idea for the usual Johnny’s magazines.

Magazines are also bound differently. Your weekly television magazines are cheaply made and bound with a staple.

Your monthly, bi monthly, and quarterly magazines are usually of higher quality (thus more money) and bound with glue.

The method of clipping is vastly different between the two. Clipping weekly magazines are so much easier than monthly magazines, especially fashion magazines which are essentially mooks (magazine + book = mook).

Clipping of the Magazines

Stapled Bound

We’ll start off with the easiest of the two, the staple bound magazines.

Sometimes weekly magazines contain mini books within the magazine itself, probably because of a focus feature or special. These are a bit harder, depending on how they’re bound into the book. In any case, the best way to do is to remove the staples.

After removing the staples, you turn the magazine over and pull them out. The book will then come apart like a folded newspaper. You can then take out the extra book or the pages you wish to chop out.

With the book removed, or pages, you can take your paper/box cutter and slice along the indented line/crease. Do this on a hard, steady, surface, and slowly as you don’t want the blade to go off track or rip the page. Weekly magazine paper is very cheap and prone to crinkling and ripping.

Once the pages are cut, you should have this as a final result. Kanjani8 was featured on the cover so I removed the cover and their bonus feature.

After you’re finished, you can toss the remainder of the book away to be recycled.

Glue Bound

These magazines are easy if you do it right, if not, you can end up chopping the book up and loosing whatever you wanted to do.

Open the book as wide as you can and take the cutter to the spine of the book. Basically carve down the spine to cut away at the glue binding and split the book in half.

If you did it right, you’ll see the glue spine. Please be careful, as carving away at the spine will cause you to cut through at certain points so always do this on a hard surface or you’ll end up stabbing yourself.

Once you’ve successfully separated the spine, you’ll be able to simply “pull” the pages out the book.

Please be gentle, as you CAN rip the page in half and loose whatever you were trying to do. Slowly pull the page out the book, it should feel like you’re pulling out a posted note or something. Don’t just rip it out.

Organizing the Magazines

Your favorite idol or whatever won’t always ahve the cover, so its then when you need to use posted notes to write down the magazine, the issue number, and date.

Stick it to the page

And then throw it with the rest of the other clipping stacks. If there a serial, organize it with the rest of same serial. If they’re stand alones, organize it (if you can) by month and year.

Once done organizing your clippings, stick them in the binders and you’re good to go. Less magazines to worry about and more space to shove more shit into.

Hope this helps 🙂