Blog Archives -- Random Notes
Welcome to the blog archives, a special area of collecting old magazines .com, at one time only available only to subscribers of our monthly Random Issues Newsletter, but now open to the public since I ceased publication of that newsletter.
Immediately below are our most recent blog posts related to magazine collecting which have been pulled directly from our Profiles & Premiums blog.
Following are items that were posted on the original version of the blog when located at Collecting-Old-Magazines.com from 2005-2006. These items are slowly being moved over to the main blog, but will be here for your enjoyment until they are moved. Items are listed beginning with the most recent entry.
Any references to current auctions or sales most likely refer to long expired items which may have/probably have already sold. At the same time, some items, especially the more recent ones, may still be available. Enjoy!
Random Notes #18 -- 1906 San Francisco Earthquake Covered in Burr McIntosh Monthly
I had recently picked up a few issues of the Burr McIntosh monthly from 100 or so years ago and was pleasantly surprised with what I found inside one of the issues in particular. Don't get me wrong, all three are really neat, strong condition and complete -- no small task for this particular publication, which was bound with a string and marketed its own matting and framing for its odd-sized 6-1/4" X 12" pages with ads in the back of the issues. The June 1906 issue though brought a little bit of history with it though.
With Sarah Bernhardt pictured both on the cover and inside on a really sharp illustrated print, I was satisfied with the issue. I hadn't really noticed that it referred to itself as the "San Francisco Number" at the top of the cover. Yep, it carried photos of San Francisco from just before and after the infamous 1906 earthquake including some of the city on fire. While an earthquake is really not something that can be captured by photograph, this issue does carry photos of a companion disaster, which certainly photographed dramatically, that being an eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
So all in one issue we have photos covering what is perhaps the most famous earthquake in history along with the eruption of one of the most feared volcanoes in the world. 101 years old, the issue is complete and in outstanding condition barring a light liquid stain near the bottom edge of several pages. It is currently for sale in my store here if still available.
Random Notes #17 -- Photo of Babe Ruth Wearing a Fake Beard in the Mid-Week Pictorial
Quick history, the Mid-Week Pictorial began with an issue dated September 9, 1914 as a special publishing the overflow of European war photos from its Sunday Rotogravure section. TIME Magazine, in it's Sep. 7, 1936 issue, which mentions the sale of the Mid-Week Pictorial to Monte Bourjaily, noted that their circulation topped out at just over 65,000 in 1925.
Important because of its style as a pre-cursor to LIFE and the other photojournals, the Mid-Week Pictorial would cease publication as soon as 1937.
I'm only bringing it up because this marks the third week of Mid-Week Pictorial sales for me on eBay and every week I'm more impressed by how packed each issue is. The ones that I'm selling date 1932-1934 and feature tons of FDR, Lindbergh, Earhardt, movie stars and sports stars such as Ellsworth Vines, Helen Wills Moody, and most importantly, Babe Ruth.
In fact, it was a shot of the Bambino which led to this post. After all, how could I resist Babe Ruth in a fake beard:
From the April 15, 1933 Mid-Week Pictorial
More Mid-Week auctions go up tonight, see my eBay auctions link, but in the meantime here's the article about the Pictorial from the Sep. 7, 1936 issue of TIME.
Random Notes #16 -- First publication of "The Pearl" by John Steinbeck in Woman's Home Companion
I had to read it back in junior high school, and to be quite honest it turned me off Steinbeck for awhile, but he'd later become one of my favorite authors. (You know if they wanted us to study one of his slimmer volumes why not "Of Mice and Men" or even "The Moon is Down" which is much more exciting.) The now classic story fully titled "The Pearl of the World" first appeared in the December 1945 issue of the Woman's Home Companion.
Inside the issue Woman's Home Companion proclaims:
We are proud to be the first to publish John Steinbeck's exceptionally moving and tender short novel, The Pearl of the World
Gertrude Battles Lane edited Woman's Home Companion starting in 1911 through to her death in 1941. The magazine slumped after her death and ceased publication in 1957.
E-Commerce Notes #3 -- Results of the 1943 Newsweek Test on eBay
Call it conclusive, yet inconclusive, truth be told I'm not buying my results. Last week I listed 15 issues of Newsweek from 1943 on eBay, issues that in my mind had become stale stock, but which at the same time I still thought of as high-quality vintage magazines. Rather than dropping the prices ridiculously low I decided to spruce up the listings a little.
My original descriptions were poor, just mention of the date and the cover subject with grading as detailed as always. The items sat in my eBay Store for at least two years after I first listed them at auction, and mind you they were relisted at auction several times in this appx. two year period with no success. I paged through them, showed them the proper attention, and put a ton of details into the descriptions listing the titles on every interesting story that I came across.
At first glance I was pleased, 5 of the 15 issues sold, which is not great but pretty darn good for items I've had no luck with for so long. One of the issues even received two bids. On the whole I pulled $32.96 out of thin air, though on the other hand they did take time to revise and time is more valuable than that.
Something else that I found curious was that 4 of the 5 issues sold to bidders outside the U.S. and even stranger 2 issues to different bidders from Canada, and 2 issues to different bidders from Italy. This makes me wonder if Canada and Italy had some sort of promotion running, which would tarnish the results a little more.
The not so final verdict is that I will try again with another batch either this week or next. I'm also going to relist the 10 issues which passed in my eBay Store for a month and try jacking the prices up a little more on them. Any sale made there would be a bonus and help to validate the time spent working on these.
Perhaps Newsweek, which is not univerally collected like TIME, LIFE, or the Saturday Evening Post, for example, was a poor choice for this test. But then again, I don't have any issues of those other magazines that have been sitting without interest for this long, so Newsweek won out by default.
An idea for a future test would be to take one of the more popular magazines, like those named above, list some with all of the details I usually include and then do a few bare boned listings on one of my other eBay ID's, just title, image, brief description of condition. Then again, who wants to give away the good stuff like that!
E-Commerce Notes #2 -- Let's See if It's Worth All of the Time to List Magazines Right
An interesting test case for me this week. A couple of years ago I bought a nice grouping of Newsweek from 1941-1943, not a complete run, but pretty close. I listed them quick at that time, didn't get into listing the contents, and sold off all of the issues with good covers rather quickly. I have about 45-50 issues left which have become stale stock having sat available in my store since they were first auctioned, and put at auction every few months for prices from $5-$10 apiece.
I was short on time Friday and hadn't scanned anything new to list, so I thought of these issues and decided to finally go through them right and list as many as I could. I ended all of the listings from 1943 (19 issues) and found the time to list 15 of them. I'll publish here the before and after for one of these, the Dec. 20, 1943 issue.
Here's the before:
Title: Newsweek Dec 20 1943 Marines Receive Letters from Home
ITEM DESCRIPTION: With mailing label on cover. Complete magazine. World War II era issue. Grades G or 3/10 with a 1-3/8" split at the bottom of the spine and a half-inch split at the top, some short tears on the covers at the staples in the binding causing the cover to be slightly loose, light age toning to pages but contents otherwise nice. Standard sized magazine.
And here's the revised listing:
Title: Newsweek Dec 20 1943 Letters from Home - Walt Disney ad
ITEM DESCRIPTION: Interesting contents that I picked up from paging through this World War II era issue of Newsweek are as follows:
GRADING - CONDITION:
With mailing label on cover. Complete magazine. Grades G-VG or 3.5/10 with a 1-3/8" split at the bottom of the spine and a half-inch split at the top, some short tears on the covers at the staples in the binding causing the cover to be slightly loose, light age toning to pages but contents otherwise nice. Standard sized magazine.
Wow, the condition even improved--well, that's probably because the issue got a better look.
Anyway, my purpose for publishing this is because I wanted to mark this little study down somewhere--do the details really improve the chance of selling the item? Obviously they should, as the issue now offers more items of interest, but at the same time the first listing took about 2-3 minutes to complete, while the second took about 15-20 minutes to compose. The 15 issues that I did list are all available at $5-$10 again, so the pricing is about the same. They end next Friday, so I guess we'll see what happens!
By the way, the first 24 hours passed without a bid on any of the 15 issues.
Random Notes #15 -- Fiction by 22-year-old John Huston in The American Mercury
It's well-known that Huston, legendary director and son of Hollywood star Walter Huston, was actually a man of several skills and interests ranging from acting, of course, to writing, painting, boxing, and even fox-hunting, but it was still a nice surprise to come across an early piece of fiction written by him in the March 1929 issue of H.L. Mencken's The American Mercury.
The story, "Fool", is actually about a boxer in New York and touches upon both race and religion with a lot of grit and blood laid over top. Even with my own knowledge of Huston basically limited to a handful of the films he directed and the excellent 1989 documentary, "John Huston: The Man, the Movies, the Maverick" (available on DVD as part of the 2-disc The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
From the about the authors page of The American Mercury:
"John Huston is the son of Walter Huston, the actor, and Rhea Huston Stevens, a New York newspaper woman. He was born in Missouri and has lived in New York, Los Angeles and Mexico City."
Yet another case of there just not being much to put into print about the person yet, but back in 1929 these 5-pages of fiction came towards the front-end of a very impressive artistic life.
Check out more about John Huston on the imdb:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001379/
Random Notes #14 -- Early writing by the prolific Kathleen Norris
Not that I've spent the time to read their work, but in my mind when I think of Norris I always also think of Clarence Budington Kelland because it seems that whenever I'm listing old magazines for sale, they're always there! So when I was listing a September 1910 issue of the Atlantic and saw her listed I became curious because this seemed a little earlier than I usually come across her name.
Luckily there's a lot more info available on Norris than there was for Kelland. I didn't know that Norris was her married name, nor that her husband, Charles Norris was also a writer, and especially had no clue that this made Frank Norris, author of one of my favorites, "McTeague", her brother-in-law.
I was more interested in the timing of this story though, "What Happened to Alanna", and quickly discovered that I was correct to assume it was early. Norris' first novel appears to have been published in 1911, the excellent FictionMags site lists a story in the May 1911 issue of Munsey's as their earliest, but the best info appears to have come from Norris herself, in her 1925 autobiography "Noon". Here she only refers to two stories published in The Telegram as pre-dating Alanna in the the Atlantic.
So in summary, "What Happened to Alanna" would appear to be Kathleen Norris' earliest published work in a major publication.
Random Notes #13 -- The earliest work of Wallace Stegner
Stegner's not someone I have read myself, and basically my interest in him was based upon picking up an August 1936 issue of STORY, which the Russell price guide
Anyway, I'm moving away from the point of this post, which is being made because when I had listed this issue at auction and mentioned how it was possibly Stegner's first, one kind eBayer wrote to let me know that "Pete and Emil" was his first publication in the Dec. 9, 1934 issue of the Salt Lake Tribune, and his second was "Saskatchewan Idyll" in the Jun. 29, 1935 issue of the Monterey Beacon, both coming before the STORY appearance. The helpful writer explained that this info came from Colberg's Descriptive Bibliography. Thanks again!
Random Notes #12 -- J.D. Salinger's first story in Story, March-April 1940
That would be "The Young Folks" and I'm auctioning off a copy of the rare issue this week on eBay. For those of you who read this, I'll let you know up front that the reserve on this piece $489.00. There's a little stain and the original owner's name written on the cover, but this issue only comes along rarely and the little research I've done seems to indicate this is a fair price. The Russell price guide
Of interest inside the issue is the "Contributors" page, which says this of Salinger:
J.D. Salinger, who is twenty-one years old, was born in New York. He attended public grammar schools, one military academy, and three colleges, and has spent one year in Europe. He is particularly interested in playwrighting.
Guess they didn't have much to say yet!
Random Notes #11 -- Hey Nick-at-Nite fans, Mister Ed in the magazines 1937-1945
I was actually pretty surprised to come across this, but as I was listing some World War II era issues of Liberty Magazine for sale last week I came across a story by Walter Brooks titled "Just a Song at Twighlight". Facing the first page of text is a full-page illustration by Charles LaSalle of a man and his horse, and so I focused better on the subtitle of the story to see it was about "our ineffable Ed, the talking horse." I had watched the 1960's Mister Ed series back when Nick-at-Nite first started running it years ago (yes, I had a lot of time on my hands then) but had no idea that it was based on earlier stories until I found one. A quick search brought up michaelcart.com's Archive for the Mr. Ed stories, which looks to be the ultimate periodical checklist for Mr. Ed.
Random Notes #10 -- Early Appearance by James Michener in a 1946 Saturday Evening Post
"In Advance of Publication" -- "A Post Book Excerpt Complete in This Issue" -- "Remittance Man" is the title, and it is an pre-publication excerpt from James A. Michener's classic first novel, "Tales of the South Pacific", of which, of course, the classic musical South Pacific is based upon.
Mentioned on the front cover of the December 14, 1946 issue of Saturday Evening Post, I thought nothing of it since Michener isn't mentioned there. It was only when I was copying down the info from the contents page in order to list this issue at auction that I noticed Michener's name. While "Tales of the South Pacific" is Michener's first and perhaps most famous novel, I hadn't read that one, but had read some of his later doorstop sized, meticulously researched books, the best of which I recall as "Chesapeake" and the most entertaining being "The Novel". From this 1946 issue, here is what the Post wrote under the "About the Author" caption:
During his wartime tour of duty as naval historian for the entire South Pacific, the author of this tale served in some capacity on forty-nine islands, from New Zealand to Tarawa and from Australia to Tahiti. Out of his experiences came an extraordinary book, Tales of the South Pacific, to be published in February by The MacMillan Company. When we read the book manuscript, we thought it brought home more of the what-it-was-really-like flavor of the war in that area than anything we had ever read. We asked the author whether the tales were fact or fiction, and he wrote in explanation: "One might say my manuscript is a memorial to the bull sessions at the Hotel De Gink on Guadalcanal. No story in the manuscript is entirely fiction. Each passage has a basis in fact. No officers or men are patterned after specific individuals, but there is substantiation for their actions." Another tale from Mr. Michener's forthcoming book will be published in a coming issue of the Post.
--The Editors
Random Notes #9 -- Rafael Sabatini and Captain Blood in The American
I was pleasantly surprised to come across a couple of "Captain Blood" short stories by Rafael Sabatini while listing some issues of The American this week. The stories are "Out of the Dragon's Claw" in the February 1936 issue and "Rogue in Red" in the September 1936 issue. Both stories are illustrated by Mead Schaeffer. I'm hoping to find the time to read these before they sell, as I'm a huge fan of the 1935 film starring Errol Flynn and I've never personally had the opportunity to read Sabatini's fiction before. Well, here's my chance, right? Better get to it. I did a quick Google search on Sabatini before posting this, and found a really excellent looking site that you can view here.
Random Notes #8 -- Television as covered in a 1942 issue of Theatre Arts
"The perfect television program cannot yet be defined. It is a dream in the mind of a director; a series of unexplored shots and angles in the imagination of a cameraman." So opens Kay Reynolds article "Television--Marvel into Medium" found in the February 1942 issue of Theatre Arts, one of several movie and entertainment titles placed on eBay tonight for immediate sale.
The article takes a look at programming bound for success and failure, with some explanatory detail accompanying each of the following bulleted points.
Television is Kind To:
Television is unkind to:
Each item is explained in about a paragraph.
Random Notes #7 -- September 1, 1952: LIFE Publishes Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea"
We've seen how popular serialized longer stories were in old magazines and gone over so many short stories that appeared over the years. LIFE tried something a little different with its September 1, 1952 issue though -- it published Ernest Hemingway's entire 26,500-plus word novel, The Old Man and the Sea, complete in a single issue, and did so before it was even published in book form. Of course it wouldn't matter to us too much today if they chose a lesser book or a lesser writer, and while Hemingway isn't one of my particular favorites the importance of this publication cannot be denied.
From my current auction listing: As noted in the yellow band on the cover of this special issue "An Extra Dividend in This Issue -- 'The Old Man and the Sea' -- by Hemingway -- A Complete New Book -- First Publication." Though LIFE was mainly a magazine filled with photo essays they explain the inclusion of the Hemingway novel right on the contents page: "...But once in a while words alone can paint picture's in the reader's mind that the camera cannot capture. This is by way of saying that we think Ernest Hemingway's 27,000-word book, The Old Man and the Sea (pp 34-54), will be one of the most pictorial experiences you've ever had." The photo on the front cover of Hemingway is by LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, as is the full-page color photo at the start of the novel on page 34. On page 20 is an Editorial titled "A Great American Storyteller" that is another entire page of text about Hemingway (This week LIFE has the honor of publishing Ernest Heminway's latest work...). The novel itself runs from pages 35-54, all uninterupted text placed specially in the center of the issue with drawings by Noel Sickles. A very special issue of LIFE.
E-commerce Notes #1: Tried the Quick Shopping Cart from GoDaddy
And it was a quick trial, about 8 hours registered all tolled, and now I'm crossing my fingers on a potential refund, which I honestly was not expecting.
I'll probably detail this a little more in the "tips" section of the next Random Issues Newsletter, but for those of you who have subscribed to any of my newsletters or checked my blog postings, you know I've been looking for the ideal shopping cart for awhile now. I just want a little independence from eBay and all of their little fees and rules but I'm coming up empty. Budget is small, so any custom system is out. I can tinker a little, but not enough for osCommerce, so that's out. I've had stores in the past in malls such as Ruby Lane and TIAS and while there's a lot I like about the malls I don't care for their percentage on sales or any rules that restrict me from linking back to my sites.
I looked at ShopSite, tried their demo and the current release isn't eBay compatible. Even without any eBay functionality I'd need their most expensive package, which is a little too much for me to lay out in one sitting. I tried ProStores when they first opened, didn't care for it and shut down. I really wanted to try them again, but find it very hard to pull the trigger to do so when just about every comment I see from those who have used ProStores more recently than me is negative. Not much, if any, positive buzz at all. So I looked at GoDaddy, and figured what the heck. I've used them for years for domain names and you can't get much more reputable. It's got to be decent, right?
I had received an e-mail with a 15% off coupon, so even with an extra domain name I registered it cost me only $44.73 to set up what was to be a system with a $49.99 recurring monthly charge.
I'll save the details for Random Issues, but why did I quit after 8 hours?
This may work out as a first store for people who haven't tried other offerings, but as someone who has tried and/or used all those mentioned above, plus had experience with Marketworks and other eBay listing tools, it certainly wasn't for me.
If they don't refund me I'll understand as they noted everywhere that they wouldn't--in fact I'm surprised that they're considering it. I guess I should have taken it as a warning that there was no free trail and that there was no user commentary available anywhere off of their own site. The only info I could find about Quick Shopping Cart was old press releases.
And so the search goes on...up next possibly, Yahoo Stores. At least the percentages on sales over there are low compared to eBay's. Just going to try and determine if there are any sales now.
I'm sure I'll be detailing my latest e-commerce doings in the next issue of Random Issues.
Random Notes #6 -- This
item has been moved to the "Profiles & Premiums" blog
Random Notes #5 -- This
item has been moved to the "Profiles & Premiums" blog
Random Notes #4 -- This
item has been moved to the "Profiles & Premiums" blog
Random Notes #3
-- This
item has been moved to the "Profiles & Premiums" blog
Random Notes #2 -- This
item has been moved to the "Profiles & Premiums" blog
Random Notes #1 -- This item has been moved to the "Profiles & Premiums" blog
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