Here are some magazines I remember from the 1970s as a child, back before Internet service was common in the US (I can remember that!):
Click on images to enlarge. Most are from November 1978 or as close as I could get to that:
Mad magazine – a humour magazine that seemed to be aimed at 11-year-old boys. But more cynical than any 11-year-old could be. Big on satire. It was my main source of political and cultural news from about age 9 to 14 – it was easier to read than the New York Times and way funnier.
Playboy – high class porn. I saw a few of these by chance. It showed large breasts and pubic hair but not anything more.
National Geographic – Like with Playboy, I mainly just looked at the pictures, many of them burned into my brain. I loved their maps and hung them on my wall. Only later did I learn of their colonial lens – though even at age 11 I could see that their tribal nudity was racist.
UNESCO Courier – I miss this magazine! It was put out by the United Nations and talked about the world as if more than just the US mattered. I remember reading about the Sahel turning into desert.
Cosmopolitan – a women’s magazine my mother sometimes bought that liked to show cleavage. Even though it was aimed at single women, I loved taking their quizzes to learn about my personality and (non-existent) relationships.
McCall’s – a women’s magazine. It seemed like they were always having articles about divorce, then on the rise. I feared it was filling my mother’s head with the wrong ideas (I had nothing to fear: she adored my father and he did not read McCall’s). That said, it was more interesting than her other magazines, like Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, and Redbook.
Reader’s Digest – a general interest magazine, then the US magazine with the most readers. It was easy to read and interesting, though it seemed kind of corny in a Norman Rockwell way.
TV Guide – how you found out what was going to be on television. It was where I learned the word “synopsis”.
Scientific American – where scientists wrote about their latest findings in language anyone with a good high school education could understand. My father had a subscription. I liked Martin Gardner’s column on mathematical games. The magazine in the 2010s is a shadow of its former self, even if the graphics are better.
Omni – science fiction, fact and speculation. I adored this magazine! This was where I found out about maglev trains and UIMs. And what would become the heart of Google’s algorithm.
Seventeen – for teenage girls. In the late 1970s and early 1980s this was a good magazine, much better than it is now. It sometimes came up in my research for school papers. I found myself reading some of the articles that had nothing to do with my paper that was due the next day, an interest which I credit to its excellent writing.
– Abagond, 2019.
Sources: Google Images (2019).
See also:
- magazine
- National Geographic
- Playboy
- Reader’s Digest
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MAD! yes! at least herneith can agree on that with me but she’s right all the time!
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Alfred E. Neuman happens to be one of my roll models!
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“What, me worry?” I don’t care what any body thinks, I loved Mad magazine. Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder were two of the best comic book artists of the times.
Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse magazine, Playboy’s competitor, published Omni.
Cosmopolitan was the precursor to the feminist movement and contributed heavily to the current female train of thought.
I also read National Geographic, but skipped the naked black women. I felt ashamed for them. I don’t know why. Thyat’s all I got.
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You forgot Ms and Psychology Today. Also Playgirl. And Penthouse. Then there was Ebony, which you could look at on the magazine racks in the supermarkets. The way they ostentatiously placed some usually immaculately dressed white people in the pages the same way mainstream mags ostentatiously place some fashion-plate black people was always entertaining to me. Not every person of non-color who saw the mag knew that the middle class mirror-world it depicted actually existed.
And Jet. Sometimes a South Side (of Chicago) passenger would leave one on the seat and then the train would go up to the North Side, and you could read it. This was one magazine that few people of non-color understood. But I did. It’s passing as a print entity in my mind marked the sunset of an age. The kind of people who were its readership and who were depicted in its pages are passing into history too.
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omni! yes!
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my dad had 79ish hustler mags much dirtier in his bottom drawer the gun and bullets unlocked of course was in the top one
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My mom, collected comic books, MAD magazine was another collection. I used to crack up at spy vs spy – no words were needed to explain the story and punchline.
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Saw on my timeline Mad Magazine is getting ready to shut down. I never could get into the brand of humor the magazine was promoting,
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August Noone wrote:
“Cosmopolitan was the precursor to the feminist movement“
Actually it came after second-wave feminism and in many ways was more a result of the sexual revolution. There were a lot of things about Cosmopolitan that the feminists of that time found problematic and objectionable.
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