The Partwork

Just after Christmas, and in the first few weeks of the New Year, commercial breaks on television feature adverts for a type of product that you rarely see during the other eleven months of the year. I refer to The Partwork, which in the UK are the fourth-best selling magazine type, being outstripped only by TV listing guides and weekly and monthly magazines aimed at the women's market.

Unlike the Radio Times, or Woman's Own, where it isn't critical if you miss an edition, Partworks rely on the purchaser avidly buying every issue, because as they always make crystal clear in their advertising, your Partwork will build into an ultimate collectors series, and being a collector means you must have every single one. And if you aren't building a collection, be it of classic novels or superhero figurines, you are buying these magazines to build a model of something, which could be a steam locomotive or a sailing ship.

Why not collect a set of Star Trek graphic novels which you will never read...

The current crop of Partworks include - among others - a series of magazine billed as "the ultimate guide to discover the secrets of happiness & wellbeing" called Mind Body Spirit; a series of graphic novels devoted to the Star Trek franchise,  and publications that (along with the accompanying magazines), include kits to build scale models of the DeLorean car from the Back to the Future movie and R2-D2, the droid from Star Wars.

...or start building a replica R2-D2 that you will never finish?

Collecting these Partworks - especially the ones that feature models that need constructing - requires patience, dedication and a significant financial investment. The DeLorean, for example runs to one-hundred and thirty weekly parts, or two and a half years, and will set you back an eye watering £1,157.70 while building R2-D2 necessitates the purchase of one-hundred weekly parts at an outlay of nearly nine-hundred pounds. The Star Trek novel collection and the Mind Body Spirit magazines would set you back the best part of £500 for each set: cheap, Partworks are not. No doubt many people start collecting a particular Partwork, but grow bored or conclude that it is too expensive, and drop out - how many incomplete collections of The Art of Quilting and part built models of Mallard there are up and down the country is anyone's guess. And of course the publishers encourage prospective purchasers to subscribe rather than buy through newsagents and other retailers in the hope that inertia will mean that rather than cancel, they will continue to receive their magazines and model parts, even if they simply gather dust in the corner rather than growing into a unique collection or faithful, half-scale model of a science fiction movie prop. But if you are going to collect a Partwork, getting it on subscription is possibly better than  trotting off to the newsagents on a weekly basis, since it has been reported that sometimes, copies arrive damaged and there is no replacement stock at the wholesaler. Sometimes it can take weeks or even months for retailers to get hold of back issues, causing annoyance and frustration to the customer.

Why not start building a model car for hundreds of times the price of a completed one from a toy shop?

On top of all that, and  if an outlay of a thousand pounds for what is effectively just a toy isn't bad enough, the publishers add optional extras, like binders for the magazines or premium 'upgrades' with the promise of gifts that could add a hundred pounds or so to whatever you are already forking out.

Only twice have I been tempted to start collecting a Partwork. About thirty years ago a series of classic novels and other works of literature were published: I bought a few - George Eliot, H G Wells, Shakespeare, Chaucer and the like, before realising that not only was it more expensive than simply buying the paperbacks, but I was building a collection of books that included many I had no desire to read - then gave up. But in the early 1970's I did complete the collection of Book of Football, a Marshall Cavendish publication that ran to seventy-five parts and built into an encyclopaedia on the sport that was a good deal more cerebral than other football magazines on sale at the time. And unlike magazines like Shoot! or Goal, which cost in the region of 9p, Book of Football was a hefty 23p per issue, big money for the schoolboy I was then. Every fortnight I would call in at the newsagents near my school, and instead of parting company with my meagre pocket money in exchange for Blackjacks, Fruit Salads or other penny sweets, would take home my purchase and read it, cover to cover. I actually kept the collection for a number of years, re-reading parts of it from time to time, until eventually consigning it to the bin. In all, it cost me the grand total of £17.25 and even now a complete collection can be bought on eBay for a fairly reasonable two-hundred and fifty quid. I would be quite fascinated to have the chance to read some of the features again, particularly the Fabric of Football articles which were quite prescient: the piece in the first issue was entitled 'The Affluence that spreads Football Poverty' while another predicted the coming of sponsorship in the English game and the effect it might have. My fascination does not extend to bidding online for the set, mind you.

Goal was 9p a week, Book of Football was 23p per fortnight, but a much superior publication.

The success of Partworks - and the fact that every year more and more are published suggests that they must be a lucrative line for the companies like De Agostini, Hachette, Marshall Cavendish and Eaglemoss Publications - can probably be in part explained by the fact that people - especially men it seems since the majority of these publications appear to be aimed at them - like to collect things, whether it is stamps, football programmes, coins or Beanie Babies, and once they start, vast numbers of people like to complete their collections. Apart from the cost, Partworks also sometimes come in for criticism when - particularly with the models - editions are unavailable, meaning that collections cannot be completed. Imagine spending months and hundreds of pounds building a scale model of RMS Titanic, only to find that the final instalment, containing a crucial part, like a funnel or one of the propellers, cannot be bought for love nor money!

Hobbies ought, by definition, to be fun, but for me, the potential for a set to remain incomplete creates more stress than enjoyment - I suppose that at heart I am something of a completist, and I would rather not embark on collecting something than have an unfinished collection. Quite apart from the extortionate cost, that reason alone means it will be a cold day in Hell before I start buying another Partwork.