Exploring the Time-travel Magic of Old Magazines

Old magazines work as cheap time machines, offering unfiltered snapshots of how a moment actually felt to the people living inside it.

Neil Richards of the Friends of the Pittsford Library builds on critic Brian Dillon's New York Times piece, which calls vintage magazines archaeologies of collective desire and recommends picking issues more than 20 years old and reading them cover to cover.

Dillon found that a May 1984 issue of The Face barely mentioned Britain's miners' strike or unemployment crisis, while a Wrangler ad proclaimed I'm Positive with no inkling of the coming impact of AIDS.

An August 1965 Vogue skipped the stereotypical miniskirt sixties in favor of subtle pliable knits and futuristic comfort, deploying forgotten slang like young chicerino, and a mid 1990s issue of Arena reflected a primitive dream of the present through Hummers and lad culture.

The pleasure lies in that dissonance, since a present day reader meets confident predictions that never came true and worries that have since dissolved.

Richards adds his own memories of discovering this magic portal in college libraries and at The Magazine, a crammed San Francisco shop on Larkin Street stocked with eclectic publications spanning decades.

Old magazines reward patience more than money, which is why critic Brian Dillon called them archaeologies of collective desire. His method asks for one issue at least 20 years old, read cover to cover: the May 1984 Face he sampled barely mentions the miners strike and carries no hint of AIDS, right down to a Wrangler ad reading I'm Positive, while his August 1965 Vogue deploys the slang young chicerino and a mid nineties Arena sells Hummers at lad culture's peak. Digitized runs make the experiment free, from Godey's Lady's Book, America's widest magazine before the Civil War, onward Century Past. Start anywhere on those shelves and 1965 or 1984 hands you its unfiltered week.