• live listings: Magazines on eBay UK only (this includes overseas sellers who have put their listing on ebay.co.uk);
• completed listings for magazines on eBay UK so you can see what actually sold.

The trick is to narrow down the numbers – from 404,000 live listings in this case – to focus on what you want. If the magazine has a unique name, it’s easy:

• Just 54 results for Web User.

It’s tricky if your title is part of other titles. Take Today, a general interest weekly from the 1960s, for example:

• results for Today in Magazines on eBay UK.

There are 1,000+ results for this because of all the titles with ‘Today’ as part of their name: Yachting Today, Today’s Golfer, History Today, etc. So, remove those words using a minus sign:

• results for Today -yachting -golfer -history -railways -knit -heritage -sew in Magazines.

No doubt you can see ways to improve the search based on the results that you don’t want. Be careful though, because you will also remove results for your target magazine that use that word in the description.

There is a Categories menu on the left column in eBay that can narrow down a search. However, I find this unreliable. Today, the News & Current Affairs category had 5 results – and no copies of Today were there, but there was a book about bears!

Once you’re happy with it, save the search so you can repeat it later.

It’s worth bearing in mind that sellers listing magazines can get things wrong – or perhaps list an issue in, say ‘Collectables’ rather than as a magazine. Again, Empire might be found in ‘Films & TV’. So, step out of your focused search occasionally to see what might be coming up elsewhere. Also, watch out for alternative spellings and errors: Car Week or CarWeek, Today’s Golf or Today’s Golfer or Todays Golfer.

Pall Mall magazine from 1905

The first Time cover from 1923

In between, Time experimented with both a red and a green strip down the left side, the red being a ‘warm’ red as used by Pall Mall and the green similar to that used by Tit-Bits.

Green stripe Time magazine cover from 26 April 1926

There’s a video showing the progress of Time’s covers.

Meredith publishes 14 magazines, including Family Circle, Ladies Home Journal and Better Homes & Gardens, as well running TV stations.

Time, the largest magazine publisher in the US, with titles such as Time, Sports Illustrated and People, could fetch $2bn-$3.5bn.

IPC profile

• ShopBazaar in the US is a website linked to Harper’s Bazaar that allows uses to buy products mentioned in the monthly fashion magazine. Condé Nast has competing efforts from Lucky and Allure.
• In Japan, there is an Elle magazine shop. This is independent of the magazine and has broken even after about two years. Monocle has its own shops selling branded goods as well as a website.
• In China, Hearst has an Elle site that links to different vendors, but brings buyers back to a common check-out.

Edwards reckons that ‘On average, of the 1,000 users who visit an esite from a magazine, only one converts into a buyer.’

These experiments in ‘monetising’ magazine brands leave Friedman feeling ‘queasy’ because of the blurring of the lines between editorial and commercial activities but some would argue the line was crossed many years ago by the big fashion magazines.

Paul Popper photo on cover of Eve’s Journal

Magazines just go on and on. Quite how many titles have been published in the past 300 years I don’t know and Eve’s Journal, discovered by Jane Audas in the National Ar Library is yet another new one on me. Jane reckons the cover is by Paul Popper – the Czech photographer who founded Popperfoto  (now part of Getty).

By coincidence, the magazine below came up on my eBay searches. At first I thought it was an annual from Weekly Illustrated  (run by another European emigre Stefan Lorant, who would go on to found Lilliput and Picture Post) but in fact this was published by Hutchinson – and edited by Paul Popper.

But then the Mail probably still has much to do to make things up with Kate. It was the  Mail’s Sunday sister that revealed the nickname used in posh circles for Kate and her sister Pippa – the Wisteria Sisters:

‘And according to one well placed source: “Kate and Pippa have already been dubbed the Wisteria Sisters - they’re highly decorative, terribly fragrant and have a ferocious ability to climb.” ‘

This was back in May 2007, just after Kate had split up with Wills.

Robin Lane Fox, the FT’s gardening writer, Oxford history don and dad to Martha Lane Fox, referred to the nickname in his column when he discussed planting two wisteria, named Kate and Pippa, to mark the royal wedding in 2011. So, no knighthood for him either.

Spectator magazine cover

A day before the Leveson inquiry report is published, the Spectator has set itself against any statutory scheme to control the press apart from self-regulation:

‘If the press agrees a new form of self-regulation, perhaps contractually binding this time, we will happily take part. But we would not sign up to anything enforced by government.’

Magazines have been given little coverage in the controversy, but several were called to give evidence to the Leveson inquiry, including Hello!, Heat and OK!

The Spectator has lived under government control – it was founded in 1828 – and Stamp Duty, which was used to control distribution of newspapers and magazines, was not abolished until 1855.

This change created a free Press, enabled expansion and a way of meeting demand for reading material from the public – it’s easily forgotten that the works of many of the great Victorian writers were first published in magazines, from Dickens to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. In the newspaper world, the Guardian went from twice weekly to daily publication.

The fortunes made by the magazine magnates – Alfred Harmsworth and Arthur Cyril Pearson – built on the invention of the New Journalism in magazines to found the popular daily press – the Daily Mail, the Express and the Mirror.

Sam Delaney, a former editor of Heat, has warned that Leveson could end up muzzling the celebrity magazines:

‘Brace yourselves. By 2013, every title on the newsstand may well feature a gushing profile of Nancy Dell’Olio, lounging on a chaise longue “inside her beautiful home”.’

As the leaders of the political parties pore over the six copies of the Leveson report that were delivered to parliament this afternoon, the whole of the media awaits the next stage of the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal.

UK newspapers: Times readers run the country

Magazine timeline

‘While Wintour is painted as a terrifying ice queen … Coddington never wears make-up…’

Maslin writes:

‘Abruptly she mentions the ghastly car accident that severed one of her eyelids. The injury was miraculously repaired, but it sidelined her for a while and pushed her to affect dark and heavy eye makeup. Today, still a provocateur who prefers extremes to the dull middle, she lightens the area around her eye sockets to achieve what she calls “that pale, bald Renaissance look.” It’s a look that sends a spooky message to the conventional beauty world.’

Take a look at the Observer photographs by Danielle Levitt or the many other profiles and see who you believe.

Julie Kavanagh’s 2011 profile in Intelligent Life is a much closer portrait, but then Kavanagh was her assistant in the 1970s.

Also, Vogue has put up a Coddington timeline, videos of interviews and an excerpt from the book and shows Coddington as the model for Vidal Sassoon’s Five Point Cut.

Vogue profile

Mayfair men’s magazine launch issue cover from 1966 with Raquel Welch

A copy of the 1966 first issue of Mayfair has just sold on eBay for £434 with 43 bidders. The men’s magazine’s cover has a single cover line below a picture of Raquel Welsh wearing a pink leotard inside a male symbol (derived from the shield and spear of the Roman god Mars): ‘The incredible revolution of sex in the sixties.’ It was the year she appeared clad in an animal skin bikini in One Million Years BC.

Mayfair profile

Buying and selling magazines on eBay