Double Issue!

My copy of Time magazine's Person of the Year issue arrived in the mail today, and on page 16, there's a collage of covers of all 46 issues of the magazine this year.

It used to be that you subscribed to Time (or Newsweek, or U.S. News and World Report) and got 52 issues every year. 53 if there were a January 1 issue and a December 31 issue that year. Now there are at least six weeks during which they simply don't put out a magazine.

The reason for this is the "Double Issue," which supposedly gives you double the value one week so that the magazine's staff can take the next week off. This year, those were the "100 Most Influential People" issue (May 5 / May 12, 2014, 150 pages), "The Smarter Home" (July 7 / July 14, 2014, 108 pages), "The Genius Issue" (Dec. 1 / Dec. 8, 2014, 118 pages), and "Person of the Year" (Dec. 22 / Dec. 29, 2014, 164 pages, four of which are alternative cover pages).

By the way, those first two covers at right are the December 23, 2013 Pope Francis Person of the Year issue (also a "double issue") and the December 30, 2013 The Year In Pictures issue. This year's Person of the Year cover(s) isn't (aren't) included.

So that's actually only 45 issues dated 2014, assuming that "The Year in Pictures" will come out in two weeks as the January 6, 2015 issue.

Or, I'm guessing, the January 6 / January 13, 2015 double issue. Who wants to work between Christmas and New Year's, anyway?