The middle section of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius focuses partly on the struggles of Might, the exceptionally good magazine Dave Eggers and several pals published out of San Francisco in the early and mid-’90s. As Eggers himself acknowledges in his hyper-self-conscious preface, the middle section is the weakest part of the book. But Might itself was unusually good. I own eight of the 16 issues that were published before the magazine’s 1997 demise, and I’ll soon own three more: The organization Eggers co-founded to help kids become better writers, 826 Valencia, is selling back issues of Might for $10 a copy.

The 1998 Might anthology, Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp: And Other Essays, is still in print, and it contains lots of excellent material. But Might was not just text on a page; it was very much a magazine. The editors clearly loved the magazine format, but they also loved to tear it apart. A fair amount of Might’s humor was based around subtle or not-so-subtle parodies of the sort of idiocy you see in all but the best publications: dopey front-of-the-book charts, simplistic approaches to complex material, lazy headline puns, and so forth. Those elements of Might can’t be reproduced in straight text.

If you like smart magazines but never saw Might when it was around, pick up a copy or two. I assume the profits go to 826 Valencia, which is a 100 percent worthy organization.

The graphic above is a scan of a promotional sticker I acquired at some point in the mid-’90s.

[Via Lindsay, who capped her poison pen for a second and wrote a lovely snark-free mini-essay about what Might meant to her. With endearing defensiveness, Lindsay describes her mini-essay as a “totally unfunny self-indulgent post with a cheesy moral at the end.”]