Vintage magazines are Treasure Troves

I'll admit that collectiing magazines is a labor of love for me, fueled by nostalgia and memories of looking through vintage McCalls and other women's magazines in my grandmother's house, searching for the paper dolls that often lurked within - carefully printed on special pages.Betsy McCall Paper Doll I wish I'd known enough then to hang on to those early issues - and the even earlier ones she had going back to the 1930s and before. I saw some of those fill-in-the-blank contests which were so routine back then, the one where women were supposed to gee up with a new line for a popular item's advertisement. Vintage Magazine One enterprising woman actually made a profession of winning those contests and her story is the basis for both a book and film called The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio, a story of a woman who used magazine contests to support her family, buy a house, etc. Yet how many people who watch the film understand what role those vintage magazines played in the life of that woman or their place in history? Before television, before the internet, before geputers, before cable....there were magazines....and people read them cover to cover. The Prizewinner of Defiance Ohio In the 1950s I can recall watching librarians routinely throw out vintage magazines as they made space for the newer issues. More recently, I read the acclaimed book Double Fold:Libraries and the Assault on Paper (by Nicholson Baker) and was horrified to discover that this may be standard practice even today, many libraries routinely destroying old copies of magazines or preserved them haphazardly, often losing huge sections of articles and ads while transferring them to microfiche. Would they be so careless with first editions of books? One hopes not - but somehow magazines are seen as "different", less important, just....well, just old magazines. I can't help but see this viewpoint as terribly short-sighted. Many vintage issues are treasure troves and should be seen for what they are - miniature portraits or snapshots of cultural moments in time. They also deserve to be viewed in their original form, held in the hands (even if those hands are enclosed in protective, acid-free gloves) and seen page by page, not a part missing. Take a look at the writing, the vocabulary, the amount of ads gepared to the size of the articles. Each little bit of information is a clue to our culture at a particular moment in time. When budgetary and space concerns forced some library staffers to decide to discard magazines or put them on microfiche, the results were often that the original magazine was not viewable in its true form. Often ads were missing and old advertisements provide a valuable clue to people's tastes. There are collectors who think nothing of paying a pretty penny for a first edition book but let far rarer magazines, some containing the first works of famous authors, go begging by the wayside. They should be giving them a 2nd look for it is in these magazines that so much of our social history resides. Many famous authors wrote for magazines, including E.B. White (New Yorker) who later went on to write the classic Charlotte's Web. Toni Morrison had an excerpt of Sula appear in Redbook magazine, an that excerpt was what prompted me to buy the book when it came out, a book that later soared in value. In fact, many famous writers got their start in Redbook's fiction pages, including their wonderful Summer Reading issue. It was a sad day for me when they decided to do away with fiction, a trend that continues today with Atlantic magazine's recent decision to discard their monthly fiction pieces, even though many authors got their start in the Atlantic. Perhaps this decision says something about how we value fiction today - or perhaps it is simply one editor's whim. But I do have the last issue of that magazine that contained monthly fiction pieces and I hope to collect the issue where it (hopefully) returns to The Atlantic's pages. Good or bad, editorial decisions like these (and reader reaction to them) reflect our culture and historical changes in taste and design can be reflected fairly quickly in magazines. The articles also speak to the concerns of the day, whether those concerns be economic, historical or as basic as what to prepare for dinner. Depressions, recessions, housing markets, the women's movement....all reflected in magazines. Some of the articles are humorous and some, in retrospect, are horrifying (could the author really have been serious?). But each reflects a particular moment in time, however controversial. And the artwork! It was often stunning. Instead of celebrity photos, many magazine featured beautiful artwork on their covers. Even Fortune magazine, supposedly designed for businessmen, had some stunning and stylistic artwork gracing its covers, so striking that many have been reproduced in poster form and sell briskly today. Imagine owning an original copy of the magazine, not just the cover, and being able to see how that cover fit with the entire issue. It'd be like seeing a film straight through instead of just looking at the first scene. Quite a difference, yes? .