Monday, June 16, 2003 Another One Bites the Dust Oh good, I got this thing to work two days running. Another bit of my quality of life in Tokyo has gone away: this past Friday, the World Magazine Gallery in Higashi-Ginza, run by the Magazine House, closed its doors. Magazine House is the rather unimaginative name of a magazine publisher here in Tokyo. They specialize in lifestyle magazines, often centered on mascots as a kind of symbol, with titles like Popeye, Tarzan, or Olive Oyl (they even for a time had a young women's magazine called Mutts, whose graphic motif was the Patrick McDonnell comic strip). They have -- or had, in any case -- in the lobby of their headquarters building in Higashi-Ginza what they called the World Magazine Gallery. It was a raised area that served as a public reading room. stocked with nearly 1,000 foreign magazines from around the world, from the US, UK, Canada, Italy, France, Australia, Russia, etc. It was absolutely free, and had a copy machine in the corner for photocopying stuff you wanted to save. I spent many an afternoon there when i could get down there, going slowly through a stack of issues of The New Yorker, Variety, or whatever magazine caught my interest that day. The selection was eclectic (Northern Ohio Life? The New England Journal of Medicine?), but fun to browse. Plus, there was always the off chance I would see, as I once did, a flock of ridiculously young, ridiculously thin, Caucasian women (presumably models) gathered by the elevator waiting to go up to the editorial offices. So I went to the Magazine House Gallery one last time on Friday. Other than being slightly more crowded than usual, it seemed the same. Sigh. The end of an era. No more browsing through back numbers of or Saveur or Time Out London or Maclean's or Empire or the Village Voice or .... 6:32:41 PM    Comment on this post! []