As it happens, I was walking in uptown Saint John a couple days ago and stumbled on a library book sale. They were getting rid (the shame!) of a complete collection of LIFE magazines between 1938 and 1972 for a couple dollars per. I managed to snag dates around my parent’s birthdays, but also including the declaration of WW2, D-day, Pearl Harbor, the surrender of the Germans and Japanese, the opening of the Holocaust camps, Midway, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The Fall of China, Korea, Dienbienphu, The Fall of Cuba, The Berlin Wall, The Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy Assassination and subsequent Oswald story, Chappaquidick, Vietnam quagmire, Watergate, The Civil Rights march on Alabama, Little Rock segregation, The Six Day Wars in Israel, COnquering Everest and several issues regarding launching Sputnik and getting Americans in space and on the moon.
What a find! The pictures are incredible, as are the advertisements and rhetoric from the times. Nothing brings back history like seeing pictures of the beaches of Calais or bodies of the dead stacked up like cordwood. I wish I had the space and money to buy all of the issues but had to settle for selected dates. I wonder what they’re worth, but doubt I want to sell them.
Dr. Paprika, From what I’ve found out, old magasines & newspapers are not worth much to collectors, even in mint condition.
But aren’t they fun? I have a lot of old Life & Woman’s Day magasines (earliest is IIRC 1937) that I got for .50 at the flea market in Denver; also many newspapers that I’ve found from “important” dates like Kennedy’s death, moon landing & so on. I LOVE them.
Funny, I was just talking about this very thing with a friend this morning. Does anyone think today’s newspapers & magasines will still be interesting & coveted years from now? Especially ones about…I dunno, Challenger explosion, Berlin wall coming down, Columbine. Do people still keep these sorts of things?
I kept one of the papers from around the time of Princess Diana’s death, the day before the funeral, but only because that happened to be my 21st birthday. I had already planned to keep that paper before Diana’s tragic accident occurred, and when I have children, I plan to keep the paper from the date of their births. It’s the kind of thing that interests me, and I wish my mother had thought of doing the same thing for me.
My parents didn’t save newspapers or magazines, but they did save the Sears catalog from right around the time I was born. Sure, it sounds stupid, but it’s a neat record of what people were wearing, what toys they were playing with, and what gadgets were the hottest thing. I still look through it from time to time (when I can wrestle it out from under the pile of crap on my closet shelf, that is.)
Yeah, they call this stuff “ephemera” because they were never intended to be anything more than an ephemeral, shortlived product for quick consumption and quick disposal.
I remember once finding a huge cache of Esquire magazines from the 1930s, it was full of the great writers of the era, Stenbeck, Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, boy were those fun to read, and beautifully printed in letterpress. And don’t forget those Vargas pinups!
Just think, 50 years from now, nobody will EVER say anything like that about our era’s magazines, they’re disappearing rapidly. In a few more years, we’ll probably be producing eBooks and eMagazines exclusively, and in 50 years nobody will be able to read them because there won’t be any machines left to read them on.
My dad’s keeping the front pages covering our recent Presidential election debacle - they won’t be worth anything but they will be interesting. My folks also have old National Geographics, Popular Mechanics, etc.
For a military family, we do tend to hold onto a lot of crap. I’ve got Military Modeler and such like that I’ve kept from the early '70’s; it amazes me how much difference there is between the kits and accessories then and now.
When I was a young man, several generations ago, I worked with a fellow who sold books and prints on the side at flea markets.
One day, he showed me his latest find. A complete, bound set of Harper’s Weekly from the years 1861 through 1865. I could have bought them for $100.00
God, I was stupid back then.
He wound up cutting them up and selling the pictures and individual pages (could make more money that way). I still kick myself.