WELCOME BACK: Hope you had a great month and are ready for a little light summer reading. We're going to peel open an old copy of an American classic a little later this issue, the eighth issue of LIFE from early 1937. But first some news and notes.

UPDATES: I put a lot of work into the Collecting Old Magazines site the past couple of weeks. First, you may have noticed that I changed the terms on the navigation bar found on the left side of most pages. What had made sense in the beginning was becoming nonsense to me as the site grew, so I thought it would be a good time to tighten things up some. I've separated the magazine profiles into sections divided by year -- the new sections begin with Pre-1883 and 1883-1922, with 1883 chosen as the year of demarcation because that was when Ladies' Home Journal was first issued by Curtis Publishing. I chose the Journal as the dividing point because of the ways it would influence advertising and circulation trends.

Our next big cut-off date is 1923 because of TIME Magazine -- this new button is labeled 1923-1935, seemingly a brief period, however one which will see the beginnings of publications such as American Mercury, The New Yorker, Saturday Review, Fortune, Esquire, and the very appropriate book ends to Time, Newsweek and U.S. News. A few of those publications are already covered, others are still to come, and some others were not even mentioned yet -- it will be an important thirteen years.

Finally, we have 1936-1972 which leads off with LIFE and LOOK and ends with their demise.

Currently the buttons for these dates lead to the first magazines covered in each period (Post, Ladies' Home Journal, TIME, LIFE), but I will eventually write a brief introductory page covering each period with a little depth -- basically a more detailed version of what you just read.

The Sitemap has also been rearranged to reflect the navigational changes with a few other categories added as well -- once I have some more pages for these other categories (Resources, Tips, Special Articles, Writers, Illustrators, etc.) I will also add them to the navigation. In other words, create a button for the category that appears all over the site.

NEW ON THE SITE: A Blog just for Collecting-Old-Magazines.com. Previously magazine notes shared space with the blog associated with my movie site. I split them this month, which will mean less, but more relevant postings on each. I've begun writing miniaturized versions of Random Issues, called Random Notes, on the blog -- these regard interesting facts I come across while preparing magazines for auction. The blog also automatically publishes new pages on the site, which will definitely help keep you up to date.

Also new is a brief history of the British Picture Show Movie Magazine, along with some early contents listings. This page actually crosslinks with a page on my movie site which has images from all of the mentioned magazines.

Two new pages related to Story. These I had a lot of fun putting together and one has some pretty useful free content. First is a somewhat standard history of Story Magazine and when you reach the bottom of that article it leads into a my detailed buying and selling experiences with Story which also attempts to answer the popular question, "What's it worth?" Taken together I think they are two of the finest pages to hit the site so far, and I am especially proud of the buying and selling page.

I do have some more Sporting News pages to list, but I may hold off for the time being. Currently there are five pages which detail the entire 1957 run of The Sporting News, but before I finished going through my 1958 issues I sold most of the '58 and '59 run -- so a year-plus of those issues I had acquired are a mystery to me.

And on the other hand, the subject of our final new page, which covers the Ladies' Home Journal, still features several of the highlighted issues for sale in my eBay Store.

AUCTION HIGH SPOTS: I must admit that the first round of Ladies' Home Journal didn't go very well, and was in fact a little strange -- I sold one issue out of the 16 or 17 available, and that single issue went for several times the opening bid (the final price was just under $80). Nothing else sold! Okay, here's what I've done. I've taken the two best remaining issues, the issue where Edward W. Bok takes over as editor, and the issue before it which is Louisa Knapp Curtis' last as editor, and priced them for sale in my store -- I honestly don't want to give those issues away because beyond being over a century old and in excellent or better condition, they represent a pretty historical event in publishing. The other remaining 15 or so issues have been relisted at auction -- each has a Buy It Now price equal to last week's opening bid along with a significantly lower opening bid. Not including one issue, which is very beat-up, these high-grade issues have been listed with minimum bids between $5.99-$9.99 with one issue at $14.95. Those are pretty much dirt cheap. Whatever passes will either hit my store with the current Buy It Now prices, or perhaps be listed at auction one final time with the Best Offer feature enabled.

The other really neat items at auction this week are three issues of Leslie's Weekly, all with early Norman Rockwell covers -- dates on the issues, along with the titles of Rockwell's illustrations are as follows: October 5, 1916 -- "Schoolitis"; January 11, 1917 -- "Fact and Fiction"; December 22, 1917 -- "They Remembered Me!".

To give you an idea of just how early these 1916-17 Norman Rockwell covers are, the first issue of The Saturday Evening Post featuring Rockwell art up top was May 20, 1916 -- He had only had four Post covers published at the time of the first of these Leslie's covers (which, by the way, is also his first Leslie's cover). I've graded two of these issues 4.5/10 and the other 3.5/10, and if you are familiar with how I grade you know this is pretty strong -- the main problem is that they were vertically creased, probably when originally mailed to subscribers. Some age toning as well. Scans are provided of a centered shot of both front and back covers, and two scans showing the edges of the front cover in detail. Each issue starts at just $9.99 with no reserve, which I really hope is not a mistake! These should sell strong, as they are not seen as often as his better known Post covers. We'll see, hopefully you'll be in on it, and if so, good luck!

 Look for several issues of The Saturday Evening Post from 1946 and LIFE from 1949 in coming weeks as I bought some very nice looking runs. Of course, there will be other odds and ends as well! Please go here to view all of my current auctions, including the Ladies Home Journal and Norman Rockwell issues of Leslie's that are mentioned above.
 

OUR RANDOM ISSUE:
 

WRAP-UP: That takes care of another standard, like I said, can't believe I hadn't paged through an old issue of LIFE for you already! I'll be spending July thinking about our next issue, adding as many new pages to the site as possible (check the blog for updates!), and hopefully working on a separate store just for the collecting-old-magazines.com site (fingers crossed on that one!). And, as always, I'll be doing my best to acquire as many high-grade vintage issues as possible and to get as many of them up on eBay with the most reasonable opening prices I can manage.

A final note -- I believe that by mistake I've included an e-mail address that does not exist with some of the past issues of this newsletter. I know some people have found a way to write, but please, if you've written me before and not heard back I wasn't ignoring you, I just wasn't receiving the mail! Please do try again at the following address, which I've tested a few times while putting this issue together: things@things-and-other-stuff.com

Thank you!