Its a tough one. the string binders make it easy to flick through them and look (I agree) very handsome themselves. But the early White Dwarf mags (not so much the Imagines) are rarer now and more valuable so you might want to "unbind" them and store them separately upright - that way there will be less wear and tear than if they were in the binders. Its the same problem with many older D&D books/modules/mags. You trade off access for preservation. At one extreme end you have mags and modules sealed in plastic, at the other end they are handy to pick up.

Thanks for the replies.

I saw from an old thread that people thought the magazines were being damaged by the string - they weren't as the design of the binders was holding up the magazines by a ledge rather than the string itself - but the binder is extremely wide so the magazines were sagging. If you lay it horizontally then it collapses nicely - but then the magazines stick out and can get damaged. As far as I can tell the binders only came in about issue 35, so they aren't contemporary. So I *extremely carefully* removed the magazines from the binder (extreme care required - be very slow, and use something to push the string out of the way - you could easily tear them or make tears worse) and am putting them in a plastic folder, then probably storing them back inside the binder on the shelf.

With the difficulty of extracting them I'd recommend people buy them *not* in the binders, especically as they are often being sold for a premium in that fashion.

If one is interested in the long term preservation of their items, binders should never be used. I would never buy anything that had been in a binder because they will never be superior copies. I just move on to the next auction. If one wants to read the items, buy a reading copy.