Magazine Collectors Bible: The American Magazine Book
Lighting strikes twice. With little free time the past weekend for our usual jaunts to flea markets or garage sales, we still managed a quick stop at one of our favorite little antique stores. I’m not naming names, this place already has lots of traffic, and good turnover on stock. Always filled with the unusual, we find antique hardware, books, architectural gems, and advertising pieces.
This trip I grabbed a Perlick brass beer tap faucet, some door and furniture hardware, an advertising bottle opener shaped like a lady’s leg, and some decorative caps from hot water radiators originally from an old school house, and this fascinating book titled “The American Magazine” by Amy Janello and Brennon Jones published in 1991 by John Abrams Inc. of New York, and still available from Amazon.com
To refresh my readers, my fascination with old magazines started when we purchased a 1930s cottage style home about ten years ago. It was in dire need of redecorating. While browsing in an antique shop, I found several magazines from the period 1927 to 1939 and bought them to examine the backgrounds on ads, illustrations in articles and feature stories to determine the fashion and coloration of furnishings from the same period our house was built. But it was the ads and art work that proved to be the hook that led to my continuing to explore for more. Until the end of the 1930s, graphic artists and illustrators provided incredible cover art, with delightful subjects and vibrant colors.
The book, “The American Magazine”, provides an insight into the greatest of these illustrations, and photographs that have shaped our impressions of the world, and moved us toward political and social change. Over 575 illustrations and a time line that covers 250 years of magazine publishing from 1741 includes the date of first publishing. Well written and filled with tidbits of knowledge, it is a great addition to your coffee table collection. This book’s magnificent cross indexing allows for a quick reference to selected subjects. Photos and illustrations are as stunning as the originals and the narrative provides smooth reading with loads of information(1893 the first full color ad)( 1890 the first Ladies Home Journal). It is not a price guide.
The subjects covered in American magazines range from the hilarious “Mad” to the controversial “Ken” of the late 1930s with many addressing social, and political agendas. Your own interest in old issues may be as practical as mine when I started to collect or it might dovetail another collection such as a Coke collector framing the famous Christmas Santa ads, or looking back at the wonders of inventions in “Popular Science.” Possibly your interest in history leads to the articles defining the pressing social and political problems in “Ken” or “Delineator”. Do you collect vintage clothing, with the fashions of the Twenties Flapper styles as your specialty? Others may enjoy reading the works of famous writers such as Hemingway, Whitman, or collect the illustrations of Winslow Homer, Fredrick Remington, Joseph Pennell, or Norman Rockwell.
And now the second lighting bolt out of the blue…. when we were about to leave the shop owner mentioned some old magazines and was I interested? Three more “Ken” for my growing collection.
One never knows when luck will be on your side, or is it diligence and determination and not luck, that drives the collector to continue the search for the “holy grail” of his or her obsession?
A common mantra these days, when presented with the fact that we’re in (turn up that reverb) THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY is “where is my flying car?” Everyone was going to have a flying car: they were the staple of visions of the future, from A Brave New World to The Jetsons. And, on top of that, everybody wanted one. I wanted one — my basis was primarily the speeder bikes from Return of the Jedi — but, alas, only minimal progress as occurred, remaining the environment of experimental pilots, and there’s no real hope for them to appear in the near future. Even though the basic fear of running out of gas equals an unpleasant plummet to the ground, and nobody is thinking about giving a third axis of movement to drivers that have enough trouble in their 2-D ground cars, the flying car is still the primary transportation of (reverb again) THE NEAR, BUT PROBABLY BEYOND YOUR LIFETIME, VISION OF THE FUTURE. We’re optimistic because other things, like instant planetary-wide pocket communicators (cellphones), widespread on-demand data communications (the internet) and wall-sized video entertainment screens (I think that’s actually a Sony trademark) are already here. Scientists and inventors get a lot right, but a lot wrong…and a bunch that’s so suspiciously accurate that one wonders how they could be so right so far in the past. Other than science fiction, there was a lot of technological speculation in the past (and still going on); as a fan of the FUTURE THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE HERE, BUT JUST HOLD ON, WE’LL BE RIGHT WITH YOU, JUST GIVE US A FEW DECADES MORE, I like to archive those interesting, uncanny, and just strange predictions of the future past. If you can’t have your flying car, facelift in a pill, or 
1. Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and the like. Probably the most level-leaded, aside from #2, but the most approchable and easiest to collect. Much of these magazines was devoted to current technologies, or things already in development with a certainty of release, but quite often they looked beyond existing prototypes to the purely theoretical. Army rockets delivering jet-packed soldiers, 400mph inter-state subways, and various robot, laser, and microwave ideas and concepts. In the few examples I grabbed, some rather far-fetched for the 1950s ideas have come to be, such as programmable steering-wheel and pedal positions for various drivers (available on high-end cars today) and the ability to shoot down foreign satellites. For the most part, except for very exceptional issues, these magazines are low-cost and found many places. Buy them by the box and spend the night examining for predictions that never came to be. The further back in history to read, the more ‘absurd’ by modern standards they appear, because the science applied in 1960s science magazines is still relatively current — but if they thought something world-changing and profitable could be invented in the 1930s and it hasn’t been yet, there’s probably a good reason and a large flaw.
2. Scholarly Works 20-30 Years Prior. Much drier and less sound-bitey than the science magazines, these books tend to be eerily accurate even though they really don’t know what to name the things they’re describing. The speculative text in these books, written by professors and experts, tend to be vague enough to show that they aren’t willing to make absolute statements, but show a clear understanding of where technology is going at the time. Recent scholarly works are probably still rather current, so look to books from at least 20 years ago, prior to the internet, cable TV, and regular spaceflight. The further back you go, as with the science mags, the more ‘wild’ the predictions appear by modern standards, despite the clearly explained reasoning behind it. A drawback of these books is the time you’ll need to devote to absorbing the content; casual readers will likely be put off by the pages and pages of citations and examples. Also, these kinds of books may turn out to be fiction masquerading as truth — or they may be so philisophical and theoretical to cause loss of interest. The best examples of these books tend to be rare and spendy, but a sharp eye at the used book store can find some excellent examples of scholarly futurist works.
3. Children’s books, fiction and non-fiction. While most adult science fiction has fanciful technology designed to move the plot rather than being feasible, I’ve found quite often that children’s fiction tries to stay educational and tied tighter to science than other fiction. Then, on the other end, children’s non-fiction books tend to sway further into the more far-fetched science as a way of entertaining and keeping the attention of a child who might otherwise find the various methods of rocket engine construction less than riveting. As such, these can be excellent sources for simple, grand views of the future, illustration with lots of pictures and bright colors — and, really, isn’t that the future we’ve all been hoping for? The older the children’s book, the worse its condition will be, even moreso if it’s a particularly engaging book. The books devoted to space travel from the 1950s also tend to be more valuable to space-race collectors. Still, so many children’s books have been published that there’s a good likelihood of finding gems in a box of Dr. Seuss and Disney readers.
