Collecting old magazines non-anime or cartoon/comic related

[llj]

I've been going through my boxes of books and I had the dawning realization that I've got a growing collection of pre-1980s issues of Playboy magazine.

I actually have been reading some of them on the can and/or while taking baths lately and they are actually very good reads, especially during the time of 1965-1978-ish. I'd go so far and say that it actually showcased better articles and stories than the New Yorker at the time. Lots of great articles written by great or soon to be great writers/journalists and some of the interviews are WOWZA good. Playboy tended to get great interviews out of a lot of people who are footnotes today. Abbie Hoffman, for instance. Last night I read a great Playboy interview with Robert Altman in a 1976 issue and he correctly predicted that Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg would go on to great careers, while slagging Peter Bogdanovich as overrated. Amusing stuff! You just don't get this kind of juicy journalism anymore in today's print magazines, let alone online reading material.

But what I want to talk about most while reading old magazines is the letters pages. They actually tell us more than most people today think.

It dawned on me a while back while reading a letters page in an old 1950s/60s magazine edited by Harvey Kurtzman that A: Americans in the 50s weren't as straight laced, innocent, and lacking in irony as many people today always seem to claim they were and B: "trolling" was in fact alive and well even during the buttoned down era of the 1950s. It always bugs me when people claim that the past was a more "innocent" time and people didn't "get" sarcasm and irony before 1965, but if you read the average letters page in any number of magazines from the past, you will find that this just simply isn't the case. Some of the vitriol spewed out by letter writers also would fit in just fine in today's "tweet something completely classless" society.

[greg]

My grandpa was a rather judgmental old bastard, but it turns out that after he died, my parents found that he had a small stash of porn mags. He had one Penthouse from 1979, featuring Bo Derek at the time the movie 10 came out. He had some old '50s Playboys, and one of them was Bettie Page. This was within the past 10 years or so now, and I'd never seen one of those old vintage Playboys. The whole airbrushed look was really obvious. Did men back then think it was real? Anyhow, I didn't pay much attention to these and just sold them on eBay (although the Penthouse one was rejected... they allow vintage Playboys on eBay only, I guess). In the letters section, there were several letters that were men writing to complain about a woman featured in a previous issue who looked particularly young, skinny, and had no pubic hair. They were offended and incensed. The '70s was a bit of a black hole in tastes, but at least there were decent tastes in real women back then. Nowadays, priorities are all out of whack.

[davemerrill]

the great part about Playboy is that they pay REALLY WELL. Or at least they did. Gahan Wilson was getting 4 figures for a one-page cartoon, back in the 1980s. That is some serious cash. It helps that Hugh Hefner was a frustrated cartoonist, I guess.

Magazine culture in the pre-internet age was an entirely different beast than it is today. What did people do before 8000 TV channels and on-demand video 24/7? You subscribed to Playboy, Time, Newsweek, Mad, New Yorker, Life, Look, Esquire, Harper's, GQ, Sports Illustrated, Readers Digest, National Geographic, Smithsonian, etc. Throw in a couple of daily newspapers and the Sunday New York Times and that's your free time for a whole week right there.

I got the New Yorker for a few years, but I found that I wasn't getting through it every week and the pile of previous weeks' unfinished New Yorkers was getting bigger and bigger. Matt Alt just had a piece in the New Yorker about Pharrell's moe girl music video; it's recognizably Alt writing, but the editorial "New Yorker" voice has been layered on. It's interesting to read.

[llj]

Hef really had aspirations beyond just being a seller of "classy" smut; he really did care a lot about producing a great magazine, and really went above and beyond to hire the best cartoonists and writers he could find. I think for a while Playboy was one of the best magazines in the country, from a standpoint of production values and quality of contributors. I actually do have one issue of Playboy from 2013, actually the only Playboy issue I have after 1980; it's mostly another Maxim/GQ type of magazine now, except that the girls featured are naked.

Greg, that's pretty funny about your grandfather. My, how things have changed when it comes to porn though. Playboy's brand of smut, by today's standards, is really just pictures of naked girls standing beside trees. And for a generation of men, maybe that was enough to get them off. Nowadays they need hardcore money shots and whatnot. Penthouse was more explicit than Playboy, but you can tell for a while there it tried to copy Playboy's model of "some smut sandwiched between lots of writing" until it later went mostly hardcore.

I don't have any 1950s Playboys. They are mostly too expensive (the ones I have were all bought for less than $2 per issue) and the 50s issues are only around 80 pages max as compared to the 200+ pages the 1960s and 70s issues were, so at the time it was probably still building up its brand. But I imagine that Bettie Page issue your grandfather had must be something of a collector's item. The first Marilyn Monroe issue probably is one too.

[greg]

Yeah, the Bettie Page one sold for somewhere between $30-50, IIRC. It's really sad how the trend has gone. Innocence is a virtue, but now things have become rather explicit. I used to get all giddy looking up somewhat "naughty" words (such as reproductive organs) in the dictionary when I was in elementary school, and reading the chapters from my parents' Reader's Digest book on family planning about positions and such. Nowadays, stuff like "two-girls-one-cup" gets spoofed on Family Guy. I never would have thought of such things when I was a kid, but kids today are exposed to far more stuff by far-too-lenient parents who just can't be bothered to employ actual parenting skills.

But anyway, enough about that. I think it's a fun read to look at old Starlog magazines, because it's cool to see the "dark ages" of SF and fantasy fandom and how fans reached out to each other and got information on that which they love. That magazine brought us together, you know? That was before most of us got onto BBSes and the Internet. I was sad when Starlog's print ended, but then again, it's not like I had a subscription at the time it ended.

[usamimi]

I used to have some old Fangoria magazines back in the day, but I somehow lost them through one of my moves back in WA (either that or someone took em). Same with some old sci-fi/fantasy fiction mags with short stories I used to have. In a fit of nostalgia, I once tried to see if there were any on eBay like the ones I had back then that were affordable, but people want a lot for them. :/

When I had easy access to Kinokuniya books back in WA, I used to also buy Japanese music mags if any of my favorite musicians were in them. (Back in jr high and high school, it was bands like GLAY...later it was Tomoyasu Hotei, lol.) Sometimes I'd also pick up Japanese fashion magazines for drawing inspiration, too. I still have a small collection of both.

[llj]

I have altogether too many magazines. I have lots of old issues of EGM, especially between 1991-1995. Gamefan and Gamer's Republic were also bought in high numbers.

I have several issues of Premiere magazine, especially in the year or two before it folded. I've got a stack of issues of Entertainment Weekly, which I bought a lot of in my first year at college when I used to commute to school. Also some issues of Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Runner's World.

[_D_]

I have thousands of mags. Hoarded a lot plus acquired stuff from defunct book stores, friends, etc. anything in particular you are looking for?

[llj]

I have thousands of mags. Hoarded a lot plus acquired stuff from defunct book stores, friends, etc. anything in particular you are looking for?

Haha. No I don't need any more, unless they are really rare issues I probably am not willing to pay money for anyway.

I really need to find a way to get rid of my EGMs and Wizards. They're not in good enough condition to sell, yet recycling them seems such a waste too. So I'm at an impasse with my magazine collection.

[_D_]

I hear you. It's not like keeping old comics that are coverless. Like, I found an old issue of Action Comics in my coverless pile. Turns out issue 252 from May 1959 is the first appearance of Supergirl! Even coverless, it's worth $150 - $250! I have lots of old stuff like that. But selling local is not possible and I'm pretty fed up with EBay, so now what?