Exploring the Time-travel Magic of Old Magazines
Via Friends of the Pittsford Library
The Story
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.
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.
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