Love of Vintage Magazines

Good Housekeeping Magazine, Cover by Coles Phillips, Dec. 1914

I have always had a passion for vintage paper ephemera--magazines, newspapers, advertisements, tickets, menus, recipe cards, etc....the little pieces of everyday life that are usually thrown away and forgotten, but which are such a revealing part of people's lives. 

Collier's Magazine, Cover by Jessie Wilcox Smith, Dec. 1914

When looking through old magazines in particular, I find myself reading the same articles that people read 50, 100, 150 years ago, and it is like looking through a magic window to another time. I have a large collection of my own magazines, and I also enjoy reading the ones that have been preserved online.

The Saturday Evening Post Cover by Harrison Fisher, May 1912

I enjoy reading about historical, political and world events when they were contemporary. First person accounts and editorials give different perspectives on issues, and shed light on what life was like for ordinary people. Many articles can be found in vintage magazines that discuss topics of interest such as life during the World Wars, family life, women's issues, and popular art and music.

From The Ladies Home Journal, January 1913

I can study vintage fashion trends, and learn how clothes were made in various periods. I can discover forgotten crochet patterns and try old recipes. I can read fiction and poetry from often long-forgotten authors, and I can read human interest stories from the point of view of real people from the past. 

Hairstyles of 1913, Ladies' Home Journal, Feb. 1913

And I can enjoy the same wonderful illustrations that graced the covers and appeared in articles and ads so long ago. Many of the covers and ads feature the beautiful art of artists from the Golden Age of Illustration such as Harrison Fisher, Coles Phillips, and Jessie Wilcox Smith, and are highly collectible in good condition. Often, unfortunately, for this reason, many vintage magazines have covers and/or pages missing.

Life Magazine Cover by Coles Phillips, Sept. 1921

Long before the internet, and in an age where not everyone had a telephone, magazines were an especially important lifeline for people, and formed a unique type of community among their readers. They forged a connection to the wider world, and provided entertainment, inspiration and education for people of all ages. Women's magazines, even into the 1970s and 1980s, often connected readers who hoped to exchange old issues, recipes and patterns, or who were looking for pen-pals with similar interests.

Ladies' Home Journal Cover by Coles Phillips, Oct. 1921

This letter to the editor of the Ladies' Home Journal from 1913, illustrates the importance of that magazine to a woman and her husband who lived through difficult times in a rural area:

Little Journal Stories From Life--The Story of a Journal Girl

Five years ago I married and with my...husband fared forth into the golden West. Together we had watched the sunset on the night he asked me, and something of its glory was in both our hearts exulting as our lips met. We knew then that in the West lay our destiny; and oh, how bravely we went forth hand in hand and singing as we went! It was the day before our wedding that my big brother, who had always been sort of a fairy godfather to me, came to me and asked what gift he could make me that, in my new home away out on a Dakota ranch, would really mean the most of all to me. I was sitting by the window in my room...and Mother's (Ladies' Home) Journal was on my lap.

     Looking up at him, I said: "Jim, do you really want to know?"

     "I sure do, Sis," he replied.

    And when I told him, he laughed, for "Then give me a five years' subscription to the Ladies' Home Journal," was what I said.

     So it came about that, when I stepped foot into the old house that my boy husband had found for me in that golden West of our golden dreams, it was the then current issue of The Journal that greeted me. For three years in that lonely ranch, remote from neighbors, through seasons of drought and blight and blizzard, of bounding hopes dashed overnight to earth, it was The Journal--just a magazine--that cheered us both and put bravery into our hearts and happiness into our faces when the world about was gray and gloomy. For, after all our dreams, that Dakota ranch was not our rainbow's end.

     Imagine, if you can, a boy and girl couple, both used to the little nice things of life, going forth as pioneers into an unknown land and finding themselves living in an old house whose walls for the greater part had been papered, five years before, with pages cut from wall-paper sample books, so that each room presented a crazy-quilt effect. What should we do with our carload of wedding furniture and pictures and things in such a house? The nearest town was too far away for us to depend for assistance on any workman it might contain, so my husband and I and The Journal did it all ourselves.

   I had been an office girl; now I was not only a wife, but also the mistress of an establishment in which I must cater to... fourteen hired men...But here again The Journal helped. 

    And then one day my husband fell ill as a result of exposure--the very day the blizzard broke and I was left alone with him! How I fought my way to the barns and fed the stock throughout the days is a story of itself; but I did it--somehow. Yet in spite of the hardships we suffered those three years the bird in my heart kept on singing, because The Ladies' Home Journal made it sing. The Journal served as a companion, public library, woman's club and lecture course all combined; but most of all it served as friend--a friend with a hand always outstretched to help and a word of cheer when the clouds were grayest...

--F.J., from  The Ladies' Home Journal, March 1913