AdAge just reported that when the decor and design-oriented flash sale site Fab.com ran a two-week-long magazine pop-up shop last month, they sold over 20,000 subscriptions.  Even more notable, all but one of the titles were for the mags’ physical editions (the one tablet-only subscription for sale was The Daily; a few others were available digitally and in print).  Appropriate to the site’s audience, the publication that sold the best was Elle Decor.

With publishing in the doldrums and tablet sales seen as the potential savior of magazines across the board, has Fab.com hit on a whole new way to get print issues into readers’ mailboxes?  After all, those annoying paper inserts in magazines really should become a thing of the past. And with flash sale sites increasingly diversifying to offer a whole range of lifestyle products, we’d like to see whether Gilt or Myhabit will start including magazines titles along with their plethora of other inventory.  Based on Fab’s numbers, there’s clearly a readership out there.