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Old National Geographics -- What to do with them?

ions

ions

New Member
I have a pile of National Geographics from the late 60s onto sometime in the 80s. Missing a year or two but regardless there are stacks of em. They've been sitting in my basement for years untouched. I'd like to keep them and put em on a nice bookshelf but really that's just not reasonable. I tried donating them to a local cancer centre but they don't want them. Any thoughts? Could any of them be worth anything? I'd rather not just dump them in the recycling bin if someone could get use out of them.
 
I think we all have stacks of them -- they're much too wonderful to just throw away. And they stack so nicely, too.

You have antique ones, you lucky thing you.

Maybe we could all put our minds together and figure out how to make some kind of esoteric, plastinated furniture out of them one day when we have nothing better to do?

Tables, chairs, bookcases! I can see it now. And wallpaper out of the maps. Entire houses? Habitats!

Now. What about my New Yorkers?

:D
 
I LOVE old National Geographics. The pictures are amazing!! Personally, I would love to decopage children's furniture with the maps. I did this at a child care centre I worked at - we decorated the kids wooden chairs with various themes. Most of them were cartoony, but I'd love to do it with maps. You could also make some seriously cool placemats.

I think you ought to find a rainy day and cut out the images that you would like to use and any articles you'd like to keep. Is this sacreligious? I know they're old, but I doubt they're worth anything... and the pics can be put to better use elsewhere.

Otherwise, have you tried donating them to an art school? They might be able to use the pictures for something.
 
Or, you could sneak them into the emergency rooms at various hospitals, a dozen at a time? (Keep changing your disguises ... )

Oh, God. I'm having a Peter Sellars moment.
 
Oh, oh, oh. How awesome an idea for a reality TV show would this be. Two teams are charged with the disposal of a decade of NG magazines each.

Survivor eat your heart out.
 
You could take all of the brightest photos and cut them up into tiny bits. Then, use them to make a mosaic.
 
StillILearn said:
I have a confession to make. (Uh-oh. I'll wait and see if I still want to make it in the morning...)

;)
Click to expand...
Ooo! I'll be looking forward to your walk of shame away from this thread :D

What about donating the magazines to the local schools? If you've a few schools in your area you could give a bundle to each school to use in their art classes.
 
Do they have Freecycle (I'm not sure of exact website add) in your area? It's a yahoo service and you can put up a free ad to have some one come pick them up. I've just started listing some things and made quite a bit of progress cleaning my spare room out using it.
 
Yeah I guess Art classes could use em. The thought of them being destroyed, even to make highschool student art, kinda bothers me.
 
My Grandfather has a million of old ones... he buys them for 10 cents at the Salvation Army... have you tried a used book store? The ones I go to (Half Price Books ) also has several...

I do like Still's idea about sneakin' 'em into a waiting room. :p My mother did that with some old Entertainment Weekly mags... hehe.
 
ions said:
Yeah I guess Art classes could use em. The thought of them being destroyed, even to make highschool student art, kinda bothers me.
Click to expand...

Well, then why not donate them to your High School's library? We had tons of them at our school reaching back decades.
 
My grandparents had stacks of them from the late 50's to the early '90s. After my grandmother died, we had a huge garage sale and every one of them were snatched up by others. I remember as a kid paging through them and reading up on articles about how a young military general was going to lead the South Vietnamese to victory or how a man named Richard Nixon was running for president. One of my favorites came from the '80s. I don't know the exact year, but they had a big issue on chocolate and the cover has a chocolate "statue" of the statue of liberty and explains how it is made and processed in Hershey PA. I'm certain that if you put an ad in the paper, you would have folks lining up to lighten your load of NG magazines. :cool:
 
well like anything else, they'll probably be worth something one day.

you can always try ebay. the ones from the 60s can be worth something. you never know, there might be some fanatic that would love to get their hands on your old issues.
 
Most of the people in my neighborhood are over 60, and they always have a ton of old NG they throw out. Its great - I get boxes and boxes on trash day.
 
I have 1923-5 bound into volumes that I found in a used book shop, and even those weren't particularly expensive. I remember as a child having one with a fold out photo from Apollo 17, so would probably be from 1973. If you have many space articles in them (particularly the Moon) you could cut out I might be interested in buying them, but the postage to the UK would be too high for the whole magazines. :(
 
On second thoughts, there's probably not much detail I don't already have in books, but I can point you to a US Astronomy forum if you like.
 
I gave all mine to the local library. I HATED to do it cause I had some back to the early 60's but toting them around was getting expensive.

My grandfather's collection went back to 1912. Liz
 
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