Librarians with bound magazine volumes, beware

A few days ago, I went to my local library and started going through the first bound volume of Time Magazine that they had. I think they had Volume 3, running right through to present day.

I intended to go through each issue and make note of any women pilot news - or ads, etc., that were in there.

And each issue in that volume was missing a couple of pages, normally pages 22-23, but sometimes a different page.

At the time, I wondered if someone was stealing the sports section, if it had a photo of some old time ball player on it, like Lou Gehrig or something.

But now I think it's something different.

Now I'm wondering if someone wasn't stealing advertisements, in particular advertisements featuring women pilots.

I say this because today, I was making my daily search through Ebay with the search "woman pilot" and there were about 10 advertisements for sale. Women pilots advertising nail varnish, Camel cigaretts, sparkplugs and so on. And these ads were from the 20s, 30s and 40s.

Not the magazines, just the ads.

Now, I'd noticed that they'd done this before, and I'd thought, how stupid this was. Naturally no one was going to pay $12 for a one-page ad with out the magazine that it was supposed to be in!

But now I realize my mistake. I think these folks are ad thieves, and they actually go to libraries and tear these ads out of magazines, then trim the edges so it doesn't look like it came from a mag, and then they sell what they stole for a $10 or so profit on ebay!

Now, I don't know if they've all done this (I don't want them to sue me for calling them thieves - I have no proof. But it seems odd to me that these people would offer the ad, and not the magazine itself...unless for some reason they did not have the magazine, and what reason could that be?

Of course you have to blame this on Ebay, and on a new generation of seller - and buyer - who doesn't seem to realize that a magazine missing a page is worthless, and a single page torn out of a magazine is also worthless!

I'd love to buy the ad - in the magazine, to provide context - and eventually donate 'em all to the IWASM, but to buy just the ad itself? That would be encouraging them in their vandalism.