The curious case of the peripatetic magazine...

[This post has been updated]A curious story from Bangkok, Thailand. A subscriber-labelled copy of the October 27 issue of Maclean's showed up and was sold at a Bangkok newssstand for 20 baht (about 72 cents). According to a message from Andrew Batt,the editor of The Bangkok Bugle blog:

The thing that makes this unusual is that it had the subscriber information printed on the cover. I've not yet been able to get comments from either the [Thunder Bay] subscriber (I have managed to locate an email address) or Rogers Publishing.

It's entirely possible that this magazine got here by entirely legitimate means. My guess would be the subscriber perhaps came to Thailand on vacation and the copy somehow got left behind and sold on to the magazine vendors at the market by hotel staff. However there may be other less legal and less professional ways in which it ended up quite literally on the other side of the world.

At the very least there are data security implications because, armed with the information on the cover, I believe I could easily access the subscriptions customer service center and redirect future editions.

In a follow-up posting, Batt notes that, not having had a response from the subscriber to his e-mail, was going to send a letter the old-fashioned way. An anonymous comment on the site provided an interesting perspective:

Honey, stop the snowblower for a minute. I got this letter that says our magazine was found in Thailand. You didn't stop by Pattaya on your way to that conference in Singapore, did you? ;)))

[UPDATE: AB says he has found two more subscriber-addressed copies of North American magazines -- one from Los Angeles, one from Chicago.]