You’d never guess it from the outside, but an old building in the former military arsenal at Woolwich contains the world’s largest repository of magazines.
(c) HyMag
HyMag – formerly The Hyman Archive – was founded by media industry-insider James Hyman in 2011, it holds the Guinness World Record for ‘Largest Collection of Magazines’ — with over 150,000 magazines from the 1850s to modern times.
All those magazines you avidly read as kids long before things were made available online and thought were lost forever, or difficult to find on eBay, they’re here in the archive, in South-East London.
HyMag is based in Cannon House (which itself was for a while the British Library Book Repository) within the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich. Although it’s not open to the general public — just researchers — they are working on digitising their collection to make it widely available.
The digital archive is expected to launch next year.
Unfortunately, as with many private organisations, the pandemic has been a major problem so they are now crowdfunding to keep the collection intact and continue the digital project.
More about the archive and the crowdfunding details are here.
Hi, are some ‘insite’ mags of any use to your collection?
I have got many from late ’70s and ’80s.
You need to ask the archive, not me.