|
Browse Inventory
Search Inventory
|
Magazine GallerySame with magazines. I see a good amount of them in this part of the country. To oversimplify the nomenclature, magazines are popular, journals are scholarly, and both are issued periodically. Magazines are the middle rung of our popular published record, falling between reactive, quicksilver newspapers and deliberative, expository books in the infotainment race between the newsprint hare and the hardcover tortoise. Magazines do have a deadline to keep, but there is more time for perspective and more room for style. If newspapers are "literature in a hurry," as one wag put it, most magazines are genre smartbombs which explode on their target audience with flashes of design and showers of color. This goes way beyond the glitzy airport gift shop titles most of us are familiar with. As I write this, two new species of monkeys were just discovered in a remote region of Brazil by a Dutch zoologist. This astounding development will be fully related in an upcoming issue of the scientific journal Neotropical Primates. (not to be confused with Forbes.). Even journals devoted to industrial lubricants (there are several) can get downright exciting in the right hands. But how long can a magazine fill a niche, meet a need, maintain interest, stay profitable, or beat the competition? Books are relatively cheap to publish, one-shot affairs. Towns need. newspapers. The populace at large, however, does not require magazines, with certain popular exceptions such as the Saturday Evening Post. of yore. Many were called forth but relatively few were indispensable or wildly successful. Early magazines (sometimes saved) and newspapers (usually discarded) are more endangered than books (usually mass produced, often saved). They are generally printed on flimsy, acidic paper, and their larger size makes them more susceptible to damage and more likely to get pitched into the maw of the ever-hungry knowledge dumpster. Libraries, which have been the heroes in this struggle, are increasingly eager to dispose of their carefully bound, well-preserved legacy. This has been brought about by the increasing shortage of space which afflicts all great repositories, the demise of the old guard who cared about such original specimens, and the rise of the corporate value system as applied to librarianship. Above all, the most effective agent in this push is the propaganda that all paper is imminently doomed, and that sadly flawed microformat and electronic reproduction is a viable archival-quality replacement for the real artifacts. I handle old magazines every day which by definition should be crumbling into ruin but which are in reality as fresh looking and enjoyable as the day they were printed. I also deal with the inadequacies of microfilm and electronic access on a frequent basis. Hold on to these artifacts, by thunder, until we can preserve them in ways we can't even envision at the moment. I picture a holographic interface where you can hold, hear, and even smell these turning pages of our social and printing history, with an option to turn the smell function off. To come at this another way, what if you were referred to a small genealogical item in an old obscure journal or newspaper which could prove that you are the rightful heir to a million dollar inheritance? You look at the microfilm made from the only extant copy to find that the lowest-bidder outfit who filmed it employed poor quality control procedures, and your small article was on a page they missed, or perhaps it was unfocused or lost in gutter shadow. You seek electronic salvation, but the "full text" service did not consider your nugget fully worthy. Then you find out the original was discarded after being "reproduced." Then you will get the picture. Nicholson Baker is a pioneer in the exposure of these scandalous practices. Check out a fan's tribute to Baker at http://www.j-walk.com/nbaker/doublefold.htm. One of my other heroes is Frank Luther Mott, a country printer's son who compiled the five volume A History of American Magazines. (Harvard University Press) from 1930 until his death in 1964. When Mott chose this field of research he was told by a senior advisor that it would take several lifetimes to complete, a feat which he very nearly accomplished in one. Mott would often get permission to spend overnights and weekends alone in large research libraries, delving by lamplight into the arcane world and tricky bibliographic description of these vanishing species. Although this work won him a Pulitzer Prize, at the time it was more a labor of love, as most publishers showed little interest. It's fun to cruise vast closed magazine stacks. See how periodicals gained a modern look at the turn of the century, and watch stunning deco illustrations and full color auto advertisements fall into revenue-loss desperation and low production values in those that survived the Great Depression. It's like comparing ancient tree trunk rings where the drought years show little growth. Pick out a title from the rebounding mid-1930s, like the diminutive Coronet. It carried noteworthy covers, some great edgy stories, and exciting black and white photos (and I don't mean just the nude shots). Watch it become dutiful and anemic under wartime production restrictions, and emerge in the '50s dedicated to material and leisure peacetime pursuits. A few years later though, one could find alternative viewpoints in the right cities and newsstands. Even behemoth arbiters of mass culture like Life. began to tackle tough subjects. As you wander down the aisles, see how the bindings changed throughout the decades for one journal after the next, usually from brown leather (I look for new shirts which are "red rot" in color so the stains don't show) to dark green library bindings with stamped gilt spine lettering and call numbers (a muted, classic combination) to brighter blue or red library bindings with paper spine labels which fall on the floor. And where they are shelved as unbound copies look out for those colorful rings in the American periodical tree trunk between 1967 and 1969 or so when everything got groovy and hopeful for awhile. Today's magazines don't seem nearly as interesting to me, but that's how it works. Back out in the fresh air open market, we probably have half a century or so left where great unearthings of magazines will not be that uncommon. I made one rural house call where a fairly large outbuilding (actually called the Magazine Shed) poured forth sixty years worth of interdisciplinary contents for two days straight. The deal was take the good with the bad, so I threw the dark rotting layers (from pigeons up top and raccoons and rodents down low) off to one side and concentrated on the rich creamy center. In this wild and wooly field, you load up first and clean up later. Another time I found a yard sale with dozens of various Volume 1, No. 1s spread out on the grass, mostly from uncommon entertainment and early tabloid magazines like Cinema Arts. (6/1937), Movie Life. (11/1937), Spot. (9/1940), "It": That Personality Magazine. (10/1940), Who: The Magazine About People. (4/1941), Radio Best. (11/1941), Eye: People and Pictures. (5/1949), Big Time. (6/1949), Tempo. (6/8/1953), TV World. (8/1953), TV Life. (10/1953), and Cameo: The Purse-Size Fashion Magazine. (10/1953). These are just some of the titles from one or two of the genres. The opening statements, often called the "plan" of the periodical by counterpart editors and publishers in premier issues a century earlier, were similarly optimistic, if not quite as eloquent. "The copy of SPOT you hold in your hand is the first issue of a new picture magazine. SPOT is dedicated to one purpose: the interpretation of entertainment, in all its phases, through interesting pictures and lively, informative captions—for your amusement! Frankly, we believe we have in the above, a sure-fire publishing policy. We think that you, and almost every American, is interested in entertainment. It is our job to present picture stories concerning this vast field in a way you can't resist [see this cover in the archival Magazine Gallery later], so that you will proffer a dime to your newsdealer on the 15th of each month and say, 'Give me a copy of SPOT.'" Anyway, I had such a look of puzzlement at this hoard of firsts that the woman running it volunteered how she had found a yard sale herself about twenty years earlier where some guy was selling complete runs of these and many other magazines. He actually let her walk around and take all the premier issues. The very early radio issues I picked up went like hotcakes. I may have witnessed the tail end of these Sutter's Mill stories though. Many of the house call and yard sale-variety magazine finds today don't yield many worthy enough to sell in the shop for a few bucks each. We've been generally done-in by overpriced price guides; the Antiques Road Show (maybe my bayonet is really a Confederate sword, and there's a Hemingway first over there by that signed Darth Vader Eskimo hunting helmet); fabulous-find stories in the media like a copy of the Constitution hiding behind a cheap framed print; and eBay, the mother of all gold rush rumors. Some magazines are special enough to sell whole on eBay, but I would never join the thoughtless armies of "breakers" who cut up perfectly good survivors for their advertising tear sheets, which is sort of like killing a rhino for the non-aphrodisiacal horn. Most tear sheets don't bring much any more, as the market is saturated. If you really want to cut out some 1920s Victrola or 1955 Chevy ads, wait until you find a lot of magazines in otherwise very poor condition, and salvage them from there. As far as auctions are concerned, nowadays they hold up a beer flat with three moon landing or assassination magazine covers, which everyone alive at the time saved in the attic, and act like they’re offering bound volumes of Harper's Weekly. from the early 1860s. And most of the phone calls I get are about 1940s Etudes., 1980s Newsweeks., and the ever-popular National Geographic.. One call came late at night. "Would you be interested in buying Playboy. from the beginning to the 1980s?" "Do you have a complete run, from December, 1953 on?," I ask. "Well, the first year is missing." [Of course it is. The premier issue with Marilyn Monroe is worth thousands, and after that the price plummets]. "No thanks, I usually don't handle Playboy.. " "That's okay, buddy, because most of the pages are stuck together anyway," after which he slams the phone down. (I was glad my wife didn't take that particular call.) And let's not forget those little bio-predator paper buggies like silverfish, and the fact that the only thing heavier than a box of books is a box of magazines. I'm just trying to bring you down gently, or maybe scare away the competition. Magazines Rule! I would find them, peruse them, preserve them (above all), and sell them.
|
|
