I’ve recently come across an issue of Star Clippers dated November 2022 - March 2024.
Now, that’s a publication schedule I’d never heard of. Actually, it does not even make much sense to me. A 16-month cycle seems almost random, it doesn’t fit any particularly prominent time period such as weekly, monthly or yearly. The best I can guess is that it might be relevant to that particular niche.
Have you have found magazines with similarly unusual publication schedules ?
Satirical British rag Viz Comic is published ten times a year. This always seemed odd to me as every other magazine I cared about was published weekly or monthly. It always makes looking out for a new issue rather difficult!
If I remember correctly, through most of its run, Mad was published eight times a year, with the current issue never appearing in stores during the month named on the cover.
Games World of Puzzles (formerly just Games Magazine) comes out nine times a year, skipping March, July and November. But given that it takes me about six months to finish an issue, it’s not really a problem that it’s not monthly.
Are magazines still identified by the date or month they should be removed from the racks?
I think the New Yorker is published 48 times a year. The one that arrived today was labeled Jan. 2 & 9. I guess there are 4 such double issues a year.
What was the ten times a year schedule? Ten issues a year doesn’t seem unusual to me because I’ve known a lot of magazines to publish ten times a year - and it was always the same schedule for a particular magazine, like no issue for August and January or sometimes combined July/August and December/January issues.
I can’t find any magazine named Star Clippers but I found this.
Star Clippers has released their latest tall ship cruise brochure, which includes their entire catalog of sailings through November 2024, including previously unseen summer 2024 itineraries, according to a press release.
Is that what you’re referring to?
Football Digest was a periodical dedicated to NFL football, which was published from the early 1970s until 2005; a lot of its content was reprinting articles which had previously appeared in local newspapers.
It was more-or-less a monthly, but they only published ten issues per year; during the offseason (when there was less NFL news back then), they published a combined May-June issue, and a combined July-August issue.
It doesn’t look like what I saw but, to be honest, I just glanced at the cover on my way to a yoga class.
I’ll browse through it next time I’m there to try to find more information.
the all recipes cooking magazine (based on te all cooking website)used to have 5 issues a year one for every two months except for June July and august
I have a subscription to Prospect, which identifies each issue by the month - except that each new issue arrives in the first or second week of the preceding month. The content’s not that time-dependent, but it seems just a bit odd.
The various ski magazines (there are only a few left) publish on a seasonal schedule. Usually a pre-season issue, then a half-dozen during the winter, then a gap until it starts again in the fall. For better or worse, they’re all shutting down or severely curtailing their print schedules now and going online.
Do you subscribe to other magazines and if so, when do they arrive? I have always received magazines ( and seen them for sale) on newsstands the month before the date on the cover- I will receive the January issue in December although I don’t know which week. Sometimes the advance dating does cause a problem , where the magazine/newspapers seem to have ignored something that happened between the actual publication date and the cover date. ( Sometimes newspapers do it too. Not by a month, of course, but I remember buying the Sunday paper on Saturday evening and a weekly paper may be printed and mailed to subscribers on Tuesday even if it has a Thursday cover date.)
Exactly. This has been common practice for U.S. magazines for as long as I’ve been around. My February 2023 issue of Model Railroader showed up in my mailbox on January 3.
In the 19th century, magazines subsisted mainly on subscriptions. The 20th century saw the growth of newsstands on urban streetcorners, where the passing crowds could pick up one of the dozen or more daily newspapers and look over the ever growing number of popular magazines. Newspapers had an obvious pull date; magazines didn’t. Like fruit, the longer they were around the less fresh and buyable they were. The owners wanted some meaning and regularity. Eventually national distributors took the job of stocking newsstands and started pushing for earlier and earlier pull dates. Before very long, magazines started coming out early in the month before that on the cover. (Or days earlier, for weeklies.)
If you’re a historian, you often need to figure out when a magazine actually appeared. No consistency is possible; each title had its own history and standards, which often changed. Worse, when magazines started failing or when the money was tight, schedules went out the window, issues were missed, and dates were even left off covers. In the cliche, it’s like nailing jello to a wall.
I get the Planetary Society magazine. It’s published quarterly, so four times a year which isn’t all that unusual. What’s different is they are dated as December or June solstice or March or September equinox.
I don’t know if Entertainment Weekly was ever published a full 52 weeks a year. It was definitely down to like 3 / month before switching to a monthly (IIRC skipping a month or possibly 2) before vanishing completely.