“Are you actually paying for that,” asked a friend last week, as I shambled to the front of the corner shop, vaguely ashamed of the publication I was purchasing. “Yeah, well, I, er, um, I can’t kick the habit,” I said as the newsagent gaped at me. For I was buying a copy of … Time Out, the venerable listings magazine, which has been struggling on with paper listings for years now, competing largely against its own website.

Well, as it turned out, that purchase was a historic one, for it won’t be possible to buy Time Out any more — the publication has not folded, but turned itself into a free-sheet, to be given out at Tube stations and the like, with its listings consigned to the web.

“End of an era” is an over-used term, but it does not seem hyperbolic to use it now. Time Out began In London in 1968, a way of tying together the scattered but burgeoning London alternative scene. Modelled partly on New York’s Village Voice, it placed a greater emphasis on short listings.

Initially this had a heavy political and community bent — TO was a little sniffy about purely commercial activities, and even started a spin-off — cutely titled Sell-Out — for such matters. By the ’70s, the alternative culture was becoming commercial, the politics had fallen out the bottom, and Time Out became Sell-Out.

After that, it became so successful that it entirely displaced its doddering, ancient rival — What’s on in London — and became the bible of the active Londoner. By the ’80s, it was selling hundreds of thousands of copies a week. It held that position through the ’90s and into the ‘zeroes — and became a global franchise along the way, with Time Outs in nearly 40 other cities (including Sydney and now Melbourne).

By the end, the listings had shrunk, with most of them consigned to the web, and the final product noticeably slimmer. In the pre-full-web era, TO listed every fringe version of Coriolanus set in a hot tub, staged above a chip shop in Crapston Gardens, SE69; every political meeting that phoned in for a listing; every birdwatching lantern lecture in a vicarage; alongside the film, theatre and bewildering club listings (“Thurs at the Ministry: escape from Samsarra with DJ Phresh and Twizzle laying fat dubs down with beat-garage, and jungle dubs and fat phats”).

Year by year, some of the sport, talks and politics listings fell away (the last of these had become a free service for the Socialist Workers Party in any case) — although they came to be replaced with a burgeoning “cabaret” and “alternative nightlife” section, the latter devoted to quirky outings where, for example, people would go to the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club dressed in ’40s clothes, play charades and drink bass shandy while a swing band played brass versions of grindcore classics.

Along the way, the magazine created a distinctive style of review, the 60-word squib, shorter even than the New Yorker‘s short listings section, skewering films, plays and bands in two or three sentences. The result of all of this was rather more than the sum of its parts — it was a psychogeo map of London in weekly instalments, a testament to its labyrinthine, inexhaustible, 20,000 streets under the sky.

That, it must be said, was in part a product of binding all these energies in one volume, and nailing it with a staple. Time Out gave a sense that London was indefinite, but not infinite, and that its limits could be known (when close to its entire staff quit in one stroke in the ’80s, and started a rival they called City Limits — they had resigned because the management had decided to abolish the principle that everyone be paid equally).

Indeed, there was a weird vicariousness to Time Out. There was nothing like sitting down with the latest issue and a pint in some grotty pub, and reading of the things you couldn’t afford to see, and would never have any intention of doing so. Then there were the select classifieds — the rentals, too snooty for Loot magazine, the weird jobs — models for fetish gear and money for drug trials – and, in the personals, “once seen”, where people who had seen someone they fancied, but had not managed to speak to, could make a last stab at romance (“You blonde goddess on the Northern Line, me black guy reading Kerouac. We smiled, I told myself I’d speak to you by Camden, you left at Mornington Crescent. Box 23”).

If anything had a capacity to spin and crystalise meaning in a sometimes sad and lonely city, it was these miniature scenes of near-miss, never-was, and might-be, the passage of flamboyantly individual lives past each other, that was worth the price of the magazine alone. There is no reason  these or any other ads could not appear in the new online service, or Gumtree, or Craiglist, or half a dozen others. But as is becoming clear in the transition from print to online, that passage is one out of a somewhat shared public sphere, to something whose form we know not what yet.

That should not be an invitation to the worst of all contemporary illusions, the absurd belief that print represents a literacy, and the online world represents its loss. But it is equally asinine to believe that nothing changes when you go from one to the other. Print publications became, by their very nature, a channel and a focus — Time Out was essentially a map of London and its obsessions, with all the advantages of a map’s simplification and scale.

The online world, by contrast, has no material limits by which a channel could be possible. It spreads in all directions, and eventually becomes a 1:1 model, a version of Borges’ famous map that it is in 1:1 correspondence with the territory. Quite possibly that makes for a more exciting city, since its territory becomes strange to itself again, takes us back before the 18th century, when magazines and journals stabilised, to the 17th century, when cities ran on pamphlets, taverns and rumour.

But I am going to miss the magazine, the old mosaic of arch reviews, and fandom, and hurling teams in Willesden looking for players — miss it not least because of something that no one ever seems to remark upon in the online transition, and that is that the human eye, in combination with the thumbable codex (i.e. a spine-based medium) remains, in one dimension at least, a more efficient system than screens and drop-down menus.

The picture that a double-page spread of a listings magazine gives not only contains vastly more scannable (with the eye) information, but it sets it in a juxtaposed and externally organised manner, ordered by form, randomised by content. Eventually, I guess, screen technology will begin to match page technology — but for the moment, even the most supple tablet seems in some respects about as effective as a scroll.

Nevertheless, when it’s time out, it’s time out. By the end the magazine was selling less than 50,000 copies, in a city of 7 million. What the giveaway will be like no one knows, but it won’t likely last long. And the bookshop where I used to buy it from will soon be gone too. Words and things are coming apart in a manner that has only yet begun, and before it has finished nothing will be left unchanged.