"Late last month, as President-elect Biden prepared to mount the dais at the Capitol to become President Biden, the Grolier Club, on East Sixtieth Street, opened its doors to a room-size history of the republic as told through its magazines. History was in the air that week, so the opening was timely. Everyone was looking to the future, and it made some sense to check for guidance in the past.

“'The best way to think about magazines is as the analog Internet—they’d foster communities of people, just like on social networks,' Steven Lomazow, a seventy-three-year-old New Jersey neurologist who created the exhibition from his personal collection of more than eighty-three thousand magazine issues, said the other day. He was wearing a shaggy charcoal fleece and a surgical mask that fluttered in and out beneath his glasses as he spoke. He’d become interested in magazines as a student, in the early seventies, when he’d prowl Chicago bookshops for medical books. 'One day, I walked into a store and there was the first issue of Life magazine and, next to it, the first issue, supposedly, of Look,' he remembered. 'It said, Volume 1, No. 2. I said, ‘What happened to Volume 1, No. 1?’ The guy goes, ‘We don’t know.’ ' Lomazow found this irresistible. His hunt for the first Look became a hunt for other firsts, and before he knew it he had magazines reaching back to 1731 and forward to Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s and Oprah’s O. 'I’m the only crazy generalist now, the one who collects everything,' Lomazow said. 'It is an incredible way to learn about history.'”

Article: What Are Magazines Good For?