Magazine holders are designed based on when and how long the magazines will reside in them. There are racks that hold the magazines you haven’t read yet or that you keep for visitors, and there are magazine holders designed to hold those magazines you plan on keeping for a while. Both kinds come in many variations.

The best magazine racks have a built-in handle that allows you to take it from one place to another, like from where you sort the mail to where you relax and can peruse a magazine. This allows you to minimize the number of times you handle a magazine, one of the key points in managing the influx of paper in our lives, and makes sure everything you have in your “to read” stack is in one place. When time permits, you can carry the rack to a comfy chair and go through as many magazines as you have time for. Then you can decide if each one stays or goes.

For the magazines you want to keep, the best storage is magazine files that are close in height and width to the magazines to be kept and will hold many issues. These magazine holders come in a number of materials, and your choice depends on where they will be located when holding magazines (visible to visitors or customers or in a room that only your intimates see). If the magazine holders will be visible to outsiders, you may want to spring for fancy acrylic magazine holders. These allow you to see what magazines are in the files without handling them or putting tacky labels on them. Other non-transparent plastic magazine holders will hide the contents and will need labels, but come in a variety of colors that can be used to enhance the look of the area where the magazines are stored.

If you are the only one that will see the magazines holders, there are those made out of paste board, if you are not hard on your stuff, or more robust corrugated cardboard magazine holders that will stand up to more abuse. Both of these types of magazine holders come in various colors or printed with a number of designs. These colors and designs come and go out of favor, so if you find one or two you really like, make sure to buy more than your current magazine volume requires so you have some for future additions.

Magazine holders are especially useful for organizing and controlling thin magazines, which tend to slither out of the neat stacks you put them in. And while you do not want to save all the magazines that come into your home, there are those that will repay your storage space and magazine holder cost by being available for use over time. Other magazines will not warrant that space required to save them as there will not be any reason to look at them again. This is true of many topical or news related magazines. You can always pull out any especially interesting articles and put them in files or a magazine holder laid on its side, and recycle the rest of the magazine.

If you read and keep magazines, use magazine holders designed for storage to hold the ones you are keeping for future reference. The cost will be repaid by having the magazines stored neatly and the magazines organized for easy access.

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