How would you read this?

[IceMaiden]

I've just bought a bunch of magazines. Only thing is I can't work out if they're all seperate or stuck all together in a book. Here's the description:

"Bound retaining front covers into half leather boards which are now much rubbed and achipped at the edges. Some penciling and colouring at instances within and with some signs of water famage at the opening but otherwise fair copies.”

There was only one picture of the front of one of the covers, impossible to tell anything from that. Thoughts?

If it IS a book, is there any way of seperating them back into single copies?

[Boatbuilder]

Ice Maiden, quite often magazines/publications were sold with the option of buying rigid binders to protect them and the magazines were retained within the binder by either fixed thin cords behind which you fed each magazine with a thin cord retaining each magazine by its centre fold, or the binders were supplied with a certain number of thin rigid wires about 1mm in diameter which held the magazines in a similar way to the cords above and which were secured in grooves or holes at the top and bottom of the binder's spine. I have had both sorts in the past and the earliest one I have dates back to the late 1960s. That one has the wires. Either way, the magazines could be removed.

Of course this is only a suggestion as to how they may be bound and I may be way off-course.

[Judith Crabb]

Boatbuilder is correct and if you're lucky and you've bought one of these 'binders' produced by the publisher you'll find the magazines easy to remove and usually in fine condition.
However 'half-leather' suggests to me that the binding, whether professional or amateur, has been done on an owner's initiative, in which case the following are likely scenarios:
1.The complete magazines are stitched into the binding and though easy to remove will have small holes in the spines.
2. The complete magazines are glued in to the binding which will result in scuffed spines if you remove them.
3. Since the seller mentions only front cover inclusions are the back covers not included? If so I would not dis-bind them.
4. Sometimes magazines are deliberately bound up after advertising pages are removed. Once again an argument for leaving them as they are.
Good luck!

[IceMaiden]

Well the magazines showed up yesterday and were indeed bound into a large book, but front and back covers all intact. Took me all afternoon but I did manage to eventually seperate and remove each one. What a task! They were bound like a book, they were glued into the spine with the staples removed and some fine cord (or I guess it was once) threaded through the centre of each magazine. Luckily time had aged the glue and string and it all came off without too much trouble, even off the rather delicate cover papers, though a couple of front covers did come away. Some careful repairing and stapling afterwards and I've now got 16 very tidy magazines .

[Judith Crabb]

That is a good outcome, IceMaiden.