Back issues of Amazon magazines

[KevinTMC]

My Kindle needs help, and I'm going to deal with the problem by purging a bunch of stuff and/or doing a factory reset. I will then be using Calibre as my actual library (to date it's been more of a backup archive), and be much more sparing in what I load on the device itself.

One big issue that's worrying me before I do this, however, is regarding the magazines I've subscribed to on Amazon. Only the most recent back issues are available from Amazon themselves; so I will need to rely on my Calibre library to access back issues older than that (which kinda stinks, since I paid for them all, but that's not y'all's fault).

The back issues do seem to have all made it into my Calibre library when I copied everything over...but the issue dates don't seem to be recognized or recorded anywhere in Calibre, and the cover images are also hit-or-miss (which may or may not be Calibre's problem).

Is there any way I can keep track of which issue is which in Calibre without resorting to editing the metadata of each item by hand? (Perhaps the issue date is some bit of metadata that I need a plugin to dig out separately?) And does anyone know if--whether or not I do this--my reformatted Kindle will still recognize the correct issue dates when I load selected back issues back onto the device?