Russian magazines available still?

July 18, 2004 12:39 AM

Anyone ever hear of < ctacb>> Magazine? This was publisher Stas Namin's eponymous magazine on Russian life and culture; a gorgeous monthly (printed in Russian) that I used to get through the local Barnes & Noble. They suddenly dropped it with no explanation. I'm curious: did it go out of business? Is there any other US outlets? I'd love to subscribe.

Okay ... Front Page screwed up the formatting. What I saw in preview wasn't what I got after "submit".

The name of the magazine was: CTACb

(ie: "Stas")

posted by RavinDave to media & arts (5 comments total)

Have you asked them to get it again?

There's a possibility that not enough people bought the magazine, so they stopped carrying it.

But if they knew there was a local market for it, they should be more than happy to carry it, if their distributors can still get it, that is.

A lot of times, people come into bookstores and just look at the magazines and don't buy them.
posted by geekhorde at 12:45 AM on July 18, 2004

I spoke with a disinterested clerk and a preoccupied "manager-of-the-week" type who told me it wasn't available. I recall thinking at the time that he made that blunt assertion to simply cut the conversation short, rather than really looking into the issue. Perhaps I was imagining things. In either case, the net result was the same -- they were not going to carry it.
posted by RavinDave at 12:52 AM on July 18, 2004

Why don't you ask the Beaverton, Oregon barnes and noble what happened to their copies of 2600?
posted by Keyser Soze at 3:39 AM on July 18, 2004

Is there an email address on the publisher's page that you linked? Maybe try asking them about other U.S. outlets?

Failing that, perhaps a large foreign language bookstore could help you. Such as this one.
posted by JanetLand at 8:31 AM on July 18, 2004

I once was employed by a Barnes & Noble and spent a great deal of my time there working in the periodicals dept. I can tell you that there is a guy in new york whose job is to analyze what sells and what doesn't, and cut accordingly roughly twice per year. New, equally obscure titles are brought in place of the titles that are cut. There is often no rhyme or reason to these cuts / adds. At a large BN, there are many (MANY) magazines that are only ordered in quantities of 2, and even if both copies sell, the magazines would sometimes be cut. This leads me to believe that the guy averages his data across all locations, so the high traffic BN newsstands suffer. This was the case with the NME at my location, which pissed me off, because I no longer got to read it for free every week. Re-adding magazines after this happens is an AMAZINGLY difficult thing to do. It has to be approved by so many people, and takes so long to go through, that you should probably just find a new source as suggested above.

As an aside, working in the periodicals section of a major bookstore will make you cringe whenever you buy a magazine from then on, as at the end of the month, the covers are ripped off, and the 'corpses' tossed in the dumpster (This way the store gets credit for unsold issues based on the covers, but saves on shipping the whole magazine back). Insanely wasteful, and a great illustration of just how advertising-centric magazines are - they don't even want unsold issues back. "Best sellers' like Maxim would frequently produce over 50 'strips' per month, but BN HQ would continue to order the same QTY for each store so not to be caught short if a particularly nubile starlet happened to be on the cover the next month. At my location, employees were allowed to take home the coverless back issues, so the hardest part about quitting BN for me was giving up free subscriptions to all my favorite magazines.
posted by adamkempa at 9:47 AM on July 18, 2004