How To Get Into Vintage Science Fiction Magazines

You, yes you, can read and collect old magazines!

And you’re missing out if you’re not at least reading them. They are a wonderful part of our cultural history, full of great stories and illustrations. The magazine is the natural habitat of the short story, science fiction’s strongest form. While there are a lot of expensive old magazines out there, there are also many that are affordable and—as a vendor, I shouldn’t tell you this part—many old magazines have been scanned and can be read for free online.

I pretend to be a science fiction guru for the purposes of building a brand on the Internet but in the scheme of things I’m pretty new at this. I’ve only been reading intensely in the area for the past eight years where there are many people who have been reading in the area for decades. I bring this up because I want to emphasize that it doesn’t take a deep knowledge of science fiction lore or the ways of magazines to get started reading and collecting.

Breaking in.

There are a number of ways in to reading and collecting old magazines.

One good place to start is to pick an author that you like and figure out where their stories were first published. You can do this by going to an author’s bibliography page on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database and clicking their stories. It’s not always true but if you like one author published in a given magazine, you will probably like others.

Two others ways are to go by cover art or by title. These are tricky in different ways. Of course, if you’re in an environment with a lot of old magazines, going by cover art is easy but being in such an environment is pretty rare. Going by title requires one to start learning something about old science fiction publications. I find this is as dangerous as it is rewarding and time-consuming: the more I learn about a magazine the more I want to collect it.

For those who want to go this route, I’ve really been enjoying Mike Ashley’s history of early science fiction magazines The Time Machines and I suspect its sequel Transformations is also good. These books are pricey but can probably be found via a university library or inter-library loan.

An option that wasn’t available to me when I was breaking in, but that you have dear reader, is to use me as your magazine sommelier. Reach out to me if you are interested in getting into magazines—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, email and the blue button below all work. I love chatting about this stuff. Even if I end up directing you to another vendor or to a place where you can read scans for free online, it’s worth my time.

My own journey.

I really didn’t know what I was doing when I got into collecting magazines and I’m not convinced that I do even now. I got interested in magazines, specifically pulp magazines, because I liked the novels of pulp giant Edgar Rice Burroughs and science fiction and pulp pastiche writer Philip José Farmer.

The catalyst for me was reading Farmer’s novel A Feast Unknown, a semi-pornographic pastiche where stand-ins for Tarzan and Doc Savage battle it out. When I was done reading it I got online and found out there was a convention for devotees of Farmer that ran concurrently with a bigger show called PulpFest.

When I went to my first PulpFest it was mainly for the Farmerian fellowship. Of course, there were thousands of aging pulp magazines for sale but I only bought vintage paperbacks, reprints and new books. I thought that all old magazines were too rich for my blood.

Over the next few years a couple things happened. (1) I got into Leigh Brackett, a science fiction adventure author who wrote for the pulps; and (2) I found that my lack of interest in subsequent PulpFests’ daytime programming meant I had a lot of time to shop.

I remember I was just shopping around aimlessly one year and a vendor had a $12.00 copy of Startling Stories out on his table. We chatted a little bit and he learned I was one of the Farmer people and he pointed out that that the issue was the one in which Farmer’s groundbreaking 1952 novella The Lovers debuted. This made me realize I could afford pulps and shop for them by author.

Thus I went digging through longboxes pulling out anything I could afford with the names Brackett or Farmer on the cover. From that haul, I found I had a small collection of issues of Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Planet Stories.

Of these titles, I found myself mesmerized by Planet Stories. I didn’t know it at the time but what captivated me—other than the antiquated science fiction motif of the other planets of the Solar System being habitable—was the gorgeous style of frequent cover artist Allen Anderson (see pulp pictured at the top of this section). As the years went by I found myself reading (mostly scans and public domain audiobooks from LibriVox) and collecting Planet Stories.

From my love affair with Planet Stories, I learned that a magazine has an ethos. If you like moody or vivacious adventure stories set on other worlds, Planet Stories is a good pick. I still read Planet Stories sometimes but I’m mostly reading stories from a lot of other magazines now.

These days I favor the madcap elemental output from the early Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories, the more left-brained adventures and Big Thinks of Astounding Science-Fiction and the social and satirical stylings of Galaxy. I got into these other magazines by reading short fiction anthologies and scans of older magazines to try to get a more systematic grasp of science fiction. And the digest format of Galaxy has gotten me interested in digest magazines as well as pulps.