(Non-gaming) Anybody have 1990s editions of SFX magazine?

[LeftHandedMatt]

SFX is a UK magazine about sci-fi/fantasy films, TV shows and books. They've just reached their 30th anniversary. I've found very little online for availability of the earliest issues from 1995 onwards, does anybody know if its out there? Thanks.

[kitsunebi]

I've never actively LOOKED, but I've never come across any scans (though later editions are available digitally.)  If they aren't at the Internet Archive, they probably don't exist.

I've got issue 8 (Jan 96) scanned and ready to edit, so that will appear here eventually.  I bought it as an experiment, to see if it was possible to scan on an A4 scanner (British mags never settled on a standard paper size, so they're all over the place when it comes to page dimensions.)  It ended up being just slightly too wide for an A4 scanner, but the difference was so slight that I could just cut away a sliver from the side of each page without compromising the content, allowing it to be scanned.  Not sure if I want to invest in buying more though, especially since there's no guarantee they didn't change their paper size at some point, rendering them unscannable.

There's 2 reasons almost no one outside of the UK scans UK mags: First, we don't actually own any, since UK mags were never sold in our country.  But second - until we have them in our hands, we have no idea what size they are and whether or not they will fit on an A4 scanner (the size almost everyone owns), so buying them online for scanning purposes is SUPER risky.

[LeftHandedMatt]

Thanks for the info! I suspected there probably weren't any out there online. My library has digital editions going back to 2014 or so.

The differing sizes of our magazines is true, they make my shelf look very random!

[Kiwi]

As kitsunebi said, the large format UK mags make scanning really annoyingly awkward either by having to cut pages to fit an A4 scanner and thus ruining them if the mags are really oversized OR really expensive if you have to acquire an A3 scanner as the prices for those run into the thousands for brand new A3 capable scanners.

I fortunately, have an A4 AND an A3 document scanner so I can pretty much cover anything however a quick check of the NZ version of eBay showed zero issues of SFX available to buy.

Jason and I have archived digital scans available on Readly for issues 254 to the latest issue and we also have another 54 3rd party issues from 191 to 253 which date back to 2010 so there are indeed a couple of hundred issues that are M.I.A.

[matrixman1013]

I definitely have a handful of some 90s SFX issues but they are hidden in boxes somewhere as I work on finishing my basement.