A couple of magazines showed up in the post the other day, unlooked for (as JRR would write). Spent a short (unfortunately) time lying on my bed in the sun flipping through them, and it reminded me of my youth. Do you remember something similar? You’d go out and get that next issue of that magazine you’d been waiting for and you’d just drink it all up in a general way for a while, lying on your stomach, legs kicking in the air: The smell of the pages, the glossy pictures and other juicy tidbits of writing and other stuff to digest more fully later on….
For me, when I was young it was mostly magazines about music, electronics, computers, science, photography… some crochet, macrame, and knitting (yeah, I know – I’ll tell you more later), and of course lots of comics (these latter I did not browse first… I would read them properly first go, so as not to see any surprises by accident on flipping through… plenty of time to browse, flip -hundreds of times- and admire the art later, after the story was read….)
Question:- Do children still do that much these days? Do your children (if you have any) get excited about a new magazine and lie on their tummys, kicking their legs in the air, and drink it all in? I hope so.
Sadly, these days -not being a kid any more- I seldom have time to get beyond the flipping stage to the swallow-the-magazine-whole stage.
I maybe get to read one or two nice articles, and then the magazine makes it to one of the Piles. As I cannot throw magazines away, I have an embarrassingly huge collection of magazines in Piles. Not good. Must fix that.
These magazines look like they’ll be great. (Click for larger). The November issue of Astronomy, with a special collection called “Cosmos”. Full of good-looking stuff.
-cvj
When I was 11 or 12 years old, a friend of my father’s left a box of Scientific Americans from the years 1969 to 1971 at our house. I don’t know whether he intended to pick them up again at a later date or not, but I took to reading them over and over until eventually they fell apart. I worked my way through articles on the use of globular cluster stars in constraining the age of the Universe, Cantor’s diagnonalization argument, Conway’s Game of Life, infra-red astronomy and the Becklin-Neugebauer Object, and so on. How much I understood of them at the time I can’t remember -I suspect not very much- but the familiarity I gained the motivated me the learn more about them when I was older. I do remember the colour photos , the adverts for impossibly expensive Questar telescopes, and adverts featuring mini-skirted women (I was just reaching that age). But, above all, I remember soaking up from them the optimistic atmosphere at the time of the Moon landings: science was interesting, exciting and successful, and everyone knew it.
I still get excited about a few magazines like that…the suspense of waiting for them to trundle through international subscription channels makes the delight of receiving them (at last!) even more wonderful. The two in particular that I am thinking are Seed and Bust with the occasional Oxford American.
When I was a kid, my mom got us subscriptions to National Geographic and Smithsonian, but the one I really looked forward to getting in the mail was Odyssey, this magazine about astronomy and space that was for kids…wonderful and now sadly defunct.
I adore magazines!
I read an obsessive amount in general, but magazine-wise I started checking out what my dad was getting in the mail in sixth grade. For most of my adolescence, my dad had to search for his issues of Discover, Scientific American, and Atlantic Monthly by searching for them in the black hole known as my room.
And I will never forget the summer when my Astronomy magazine fell apart due to its perpetual use. It’s still on the shelf with all the other astronomy mags I collected over the years (the library would give them away after they were a few years old, can you believe it?), which my mom is forever trying to get rid of but I steadfastly hold onto. I suspect someday I’ll go home to find she finally went through with her threats.
As far as comics go, I was totally hooked on the early issues of 2000AD as a kid, especially the colour centrefold pages with Dan Dare or Judge Dredd and all the neat artwork. My friend and I always went round to the newsagents to get it each week when it came out, and then spend the morning in his porch, the only sounds the turning of pages and the munching of candies/chocolates and such goodies all bought at the same time. This was about 1977/1978. Quite violent and dark for a kid’s comic I must admit. My father never approved of it. Later, guitar magazines, fishing magazines, Scientific American. And…er…let’s admit it, the ones you made sure your mum would not find:)
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