I know I'm going on a trip to Chicago soon. This is from my West Michigan home at least a two hour ride, if not more. So I decided to pick up some potential reading material for the trip. I went to a local comics and games store and picked up some issues of Dragon. The issues I chose were #201, #214, #248, and #262.
In a recent, perhaps the most recent, issue of Dragon a reader wrote in saying that the recent 30th anniversary issue of Dragon ended up in his bathroom reading material stack along with his girlfriend's Cosmo and so on, rather than being something he had to bring to the game table.
The reason I am likely to bring 2e Dragons along with me on a road trip is probably similar. They stand up to rereading. I like the current Dragon enough that I sent in my subscription card a couple weeks ago, so I'm not knocking the job you guys are doing now, but I suspect there's a reason (well two or three reasons once you add in age and the difference between staples and perfect binding) why my older Dragons are often cover-less and kind of ragged looking and my 3e Draogns are in fairly decent shape.
One thing that I believe adds to the rereadability of older Dragons is the presence of the reviews column. Don't ask me why, but a review can be an interesting read in and of itself. It's especially interesting to read a review that I think may have helped me decide to buy a particular sourcebook again after I have the sourcebook and see how my thoughts on it agree or disagree with the reviewer.
Other factors include the balance of fiction to gaming content and game articles without actual statistics. I like the Voyage of the Princess Ark and Three Wizards articles in old Dragons because the story is very readable and then after the story is the game mechanics for a new D&D PC class or spells or whatever. I also fondly remember things like "The GM's Ten Commandments", "The Neutral Point of View", and "History of a Game That Failed".