Monday, October 15, 2007

BWOF Withdrawal

I wasn’t able to buy the September 2007 BWOF at my local Borders, but apparently neither was the rest of the world, so I didn't think anything of it. (Actually I got a BWOF in September, but it was the Plus magazine, purchased by Mario as a gift because he thought 'Plus' meant that there were extra features in the issue.) I still want the September issue, especially having looked at some of the work that's shown up on Patternreview in the last weeks. But now it's October.

This month, I start haunting the magazine section in Borders around the 5th. The magazine arrives anywhere from the 5th to the 8th, at least in a perfect world. By the 10th, it wasn’t there yet. I ask at the counter, and am told by a particularly annoying gum-snapping sales clerk that she thinks they’ve stopped carrying BWOF because they sell so few copies.

"How many copies do they sell per month?" I ask.

"Eight," she says. Pop, goes the gum.

"And how many copies do they get?"

Pop. "Eight."

"So they sell every copy they get."

"Yeah." Snap. "And people like you come in asking for it."

"And they’ve discontinued it because they don’t sell enough copies?"

"Yeah."

Makes sense to me.

So I’ve been dealing with Burda withdrawal by pulling out all my old issues (back to July 2007) and marking patterns that I hadn’t considered before, or skirts that I didn’t want to make because I had fear-of-invisible-zipper. Which turns out to be about 15 patterns.

So I really don’t need the October issue to keep me busy. But I want it. So. Bad.

1 comment:

Shay said...

When I stopped being able to buy Burda WOF at either the local indie fabric store or any of the local bookstores I telephoned their office (somewhere on the east coast and with no 800 #).

They told me they don't sell the magazine in the US anymore, you can only get it by subscription. And they weren't particularly cordial about it.

They've also stopped selling the print patterns to my LFS. It almost seems as though they want to put themselves out of business in the US.