Table of Contents
Bottom shelf
These are all outdoors, travel, and sports magazines.
Field & Stream, 1969 Mar, Vol. 7, No. 11
- 7 Big Features on Cars and Camping, New Tents, Camping Trailers, Travel Trailers, Pickup Campers, Camping Busses, Motor Homes & What’s to Come
- How to Catch Muskellunge
- Elk Hunting Adventure
- Revolutionary Way to Grow More Trout
- How to Save Our National Parks
These are the types of magazines I remember lying around my uncle’s camp (i.e. rustic house out in the woods) when we’d visit and I’d be bored to death. I was, let’s say, not very outdoor-sy. One aspect that was interesting were the various pinups of 70s nudie magazine pics. Neat!
I have no idea what muskellunge is… aha, “musky”. Maybe I did learn something during my days in small town Pennsylvania because that sounds familiar. If I wanted to relive my boredom I could read the entire issue because it’s available for free on Google Books. Sad that the least interesting periodicals of the past are free and text searchable while those that contain societally interesting subjects–political, cultural–are paywalled.
???
Second failure. There is just really nothing to latch onto here.
Outdoor Life, March 1969, Vol. 143: No. 3
- New Finding on Snakebite: How to Treat It
- Charmed Circle Trout – A Catskills Guide
- 2 Spring Hunting Stories – Brown Bears and Turkey
- A Hot New Bass Lake
- Hark, The Hounds
- 2 Steelhead Stories
- Action Reports: Spot News of Your Region
Volume 143?! Ok, so the magazine has been in publication since 1898. I’m not sure why that feels odd for this in particular (I’m sure Ladies’ Home Journal has an equally lengthy pedigree (huh, or longer)) because its contents feel as ancient. I could only find good images of this from eBay. Even the Outdoor Life web page for the 1960s doesn’t have this issue, so my previous observation that “the least interesting periodicals of the past are free” (source: me, above) is the subjective nonsense it sounds like. And in fact every copy is sold out.
These articles seem more lyrical and story-based than the previous.
[At this point I’m getting a little bored with these magazines, but must finish for… some reason?]
Ocean … (?)
Third failure, but I know the periodical source (ok, so kinda easy)…
Still, no match for this issue in particular. My interest wanes as my successes diminish?
Taiwan
Here’s the latest issue of the magazine Travel in Taiwan:
I saw that ‘A’ with the horizontal stroke bending up and was sure that I’d find older issues that matched but with a more “dated” palette. No luck, and it could just as likely be a random travel guide truly lost to history. The ones from the eBay listing below, though with a slightly different font, are from the 1960s. Also note that Taiwan is advertised as “part of “a province of the Republic of China.”
The rest are more sports magazines:
Sports … (?)
I declare this impossible to find.
Baseball Illustrated 1969
- McLain-Gibson: Who Is No. 1?
- Baseball’s Dilemma: Dwindling Hitters
- Can Lou Brock Steal 100 Bases?
- The Case For Pete Rose
- Pre-Season Preview Of National And American League Races
Golf
Best I could find was this 1969 Annual for sale on eBay. Definitely the same periodical.
Golf Digest
- Pull out and save: Special 16-page TV golf guide
- 5 Top Teachers Line You Up For The New Season
Note to self: blur your subscription address labels when reselling on eBay or you become like A. J. Schrafel Jr. on 73 Birch St., Floral Park, NY 11001 (god I hope this isn’t doxxing).
Turf (?)
OMG Turf Magazine (rather, Turf and Sport Digest) is a magazine, that actually exists, for horse racing aficionados. This magazine research (“research”) that I’m doing is either opening my eyes to the need for niche-interest magazines pre-internet, or making me remember and to a degree not remember the fanzine catalogs I would order to get niche sci-fi (The Rook comics!) or underground-underground rock (burned into my mind is the ROIR catalog I had that offered cassettes and vinyl for noise rock, no wave, and spoken work (from Eric Bogosian?!?) which is crazy).
And maybe that’s the key point that I didn’t know I’d have until I got to the final paragraph of this post: this one scene, with these magazines that are from the time that the scene was filmed, is an ice core sample of what the internet was when the internet didn’t exist. Patton Oswalt expressed it in his seminal “Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die” essay for Wired (probably paywalled, there are 13 ads and 44 trackers that my ad block blocked and I refuse to turn it off to see if the page will load). Anyway, in it he laments the loss of the effort it took to collect those items you obsess over: all of the issues of a comic books from a rare series, videos from overseas unreleased in America (or wherever), underground slasher flicks. Now it’s relatively easy to collect every artifact of whatever you’re obsessed over at any moment. And it won’t take months of searching to obtain that collection.
(I’ll exclude the fact that it took me forever to find the two Japanese pink films Sukeban Mafia: Rinchi and Sukeban Mafia: Chijoku, and that it was from a site that sells, I’m sure, legit DVRs of movies. And the fact that I’ll likely never find Meiko Kaji’s Miniskirt Lynchers. I guess there are still the effortful finds, but you have to dig pretty deep.)
So now you can have nearly everything all at once. But pre-internet, if you wanted to learn about the ins-and-outs of fishing or technology or horse racing you had to subscribe to a magazine in order to get the most up-to-date info. It’s mundane to say, but the internet obviated much of that. Although McCall’s and Vogue are still a thing, but whatever.