This weekend I got a call from the local recycling guy, which I know well, saying that he got some shipments of old tabloids I could pick up. I got there, and bought several kilograms off him for really cheap. I spent the equivalent of $9 for roughly half a car’s boot worth of old tabloids. They’re really worthless, according to him, and really he was lucky I was willing to take them off his hands.

I got home, and after sifting through the filler stuff, what I found was… nothing short of goldmine. For me, at least. Sure, the haul looked like a bunch of old newspapers, but most of them are… really old! The latest one I could find was from the year 2001, most of them were from the 90s, and the oldest one were from the 80s…

Obviously, they weren’t in museum condition. They’re already yellowing, the colours have been faded, and the pages are folded incorrectly but… they’re mostly intact! The complete pages. They’re the so-called “women’s tabloid” so there are plenty of… “good” pictures on them. Still more than usable, if you know what I mean.

I’ve been reading them and admiring the models and the ads, learning what they called as “pretty” was really different than today’s standards. Especially the make up ads. There’s something so… elegant about them, for some reason.

And yeah, they’re making me really hard. I’m so dying to use them.

But, they’re pretty much collectibles, no? I’m not a collector by any means (okay, you can call me one because I keep so much tabloids and magazines, but I think you all know the reason why I keep them. And no, not for reading or flipping for cash), but there’s a feeling of… shame of using something that old and classic.

You know what they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I wonder if there’s a collector or restoration guys out there dying to get their hands on copies of these… and here I am planning to just use them and discard them like they were tissue papers.

Funnily enough, despite their status as collectibles (to me), those tabloids were from my childhood, and my parents used to use them as disposable papers decades ago. Here I am today, thinking about doing that again, reliving my childhood memories but… while being hard.

What do you say? If you were in my position… use the vintage stuff or nah?

If you’re wondering what is this tabloid I’m talking about, it’s similar to this :
I found a women’s newspaper! – Magazine Fetish

Not exactly the same one, but the same genre, so to say.