Popular Science began life as The Popular Science Monthly in 1872, by a blind science writer and lecturer who employed his wife, brother, and sister as editors and contributors with the help of their friends like Charles Darwin and Walt Whitman. … Continue reading Let’s Read Popular Science, April 1953!
Holiday was a travel and lifestyle magazine that ran from 1946 to 1977. More than just a thinly disguised travel brochure for passenger trains and tourist destinations, the magazine published pieces from the leading intellectual minds of the day such … Continue reading Let’s Read Holiday, October 1954!
Very little of Seventeen appeals to actual seventeen year olds, who at this point in their lives are taking the SAT, applying to college, holding down part time jobs, learning to drive, and other things that are a lot more prescient … Continue reading Let’s Read Seventeen Magazine, May 1992!
PC Magazine ran in print from 1982 to 2009, and lives on today as an exclusively online publication. Originally a very niche and crunchy magazine, as the audience of personal computing continued to widen so did the content, until it became … Continue reading Let’s Read PC Magazine, July 1995!
GQ (Gentlemen’s Quarterly) started in 1931 as Apparel Arts, a trade magazine that catered to clothing wholesalers, but it started to accumulate a following outside of the industry so dedicated that the publisher created Esquire magazine as a result. Between the 50s and … Continue reading Let’s Read GQ, September 1979!
Comics Feature ran from about 1980-1987. That’s approximate, as it’s hard to find substantial information on fanzines. Fanzines, in case you don’t know what separates them from normal magazines, are independent publications dedicated to the core of a fandom. Comics … Continue reading Let’s Read Comics Feature, February 1984!
TeenSet was a short lived (1965-1969) music magazine that offered a disconcerting mix of puppy-love teen idols and clear-eyed journalism on the LA underground music scene. A name change to AUM (America’s Under-thirty Magazine) and last-ditch attempt at becoming a serious … Continue reading Let’s Read TeenSet, September 1967!
Disney Adventures magazine was the brainchild of Walt Disney Company executive Michael Lynton, launched in part to promote the Disney Afternoon programming block that was an instant fixture of the childhoods of countless 90s kids. While the feature content of the … Continue reading Let’s Read Disney Adventures, November 1990!
Internet research on the history of Modern Romances brought up scant info, but Dell Publishing has long established itself as a publisher of cheap thrills and pulpy reads since the 1920s and continues to print paperbacks under several imprints today. So … Continue reading Let’s Read Modern Romances, March 1965!
Sports Illustrated came into its own from a bumpy start in the 30s and 40s, selling a lifestyle of polo and yachting to a niche group of upper-class readers. After being sold to Time-Life, the magazine limped along until the … Continue reading Let’s Read Sports Illustrated, May 23 1960!
Let’s put some generations in perspective this week. This issue of Harper’s is all about the youth – a veritable album of youth! Covering parenting, babies, young children, and college-aged women (weirdly, teenagers are almost entirely skipped over – Elvis … Continue reading Let’s Read Harper’s Bazaar, August 1936!
What began in 1988 as a Nintendo fan club newsletter grew to become a staple in the lives of many 90s kids as Nintendo Power. Nintendo of America executive Gail Tilden built a magazine that in addition to providing video … Continue reading Let’s Read Nintendo Power, April 1992!
How you used to find stuff to watch on TV in a pre-cable world: you channel surfed through all eight channels on your TV (maybe you had a few more with a separate “rabbit ears” antenna on top of the … Continue reading Let’s Read TV Guide, March 1976!
Boys’ Life is the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America, and has been going for over a century. There’s not much actual Boy Scout-exclusive content in it, so even if you were never a Boy Scout there’s still … Continue reading Let’s Read Boys’ Life, December 1986!
Hey all! I was thinking it would be nice to have an editable document posted somewhere that gives a little background explanation on some things that seem perfectly cromulent to us veteran Avocados but doesn’t make sense to people new … Continue reading Brainstorming for The Avocado In-Jokes and References…Reference…Guide
Welcome to the second half of my two-part review of The Cosmopolitan from June 1900! This week will be heavy on the advertisements and cartoons and no less head-scratchingly weird than the first half of the magazine. A blogger who writes … Continue reading Let’s Read The Cosmopolitan, June 1900 Part II
Caga Tio, or Tio de Nadal, is a Catalonian tradition going back I don’t know how long, in which a man named “Shit Uncle” is present at the manger scene among the donkeys and wise men, taking a poo in … Continue reading Cagatio’s Night Thread
McCall’s: you know it as a sewing pattern company today, but for over a century it was considered one of the most influential and important women’s magazines on the market. It also happened to make bank on sewing patterns that … Continue reading Let’s Read McCall’s, December 1971
The Cosmopolitan, known today as just Cosmopolitan or Cosmo, has been going since 1886 and has pretty much never not been a massive hit. The magazine just has a shitload of interesting history to cover, from well over a century of … Continue reading Let’s Read The Cosmopolitan, June 1900!
California began life in 1976 as New West, a lifestyle and general interest magazine aimed at the glamorous young people who were moving to California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona in droves at the time. The magazine was sold to Rupert Murdoch … Continue reading Let’s Read California, July 1982
The 1980s! It was a gross decade full of gross people. You may have been born at some point in this decade, as I was, and the event of your birth was a tiny pinpoint of light in an otherwise … Continue reading Let’s Read The Saturday Evening Post, September 1983!
You must be logged in to post a comment.