Showing posts with label SATURDAY EVENING POST. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SATURDAY EVENING POST. Show all posts

Monday, May 21, 2018

Newsstand, somewhere in or around Detroit, ca. December 1964

What first caught my eye about this photo, as posted in the Facebook paperback/pulp/related discussion forum by Kevin Brubaker some weeks back, were the Winter 1965 issues of the digest-sized fiction magazines...as I noted there, aside from CORONET (an inoffensively bland general-interest magazine, as I recall it in the 1970s), these digests were all major sources of joy and influence for me at some point in my life, and the surviving magazines, THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION and ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, remain so (a few issues I had of CHILDREN'S DIGEST and its younger-skewing companion HUMPTY DUMPTY when I was about four or five probably predisposed me permanently toward digest-sized fiction magazines).

My guess is that with the open display of Midwood porn novels of the mid '60s amid Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming paperbacks, and Macfadden-Bartell low-budget items mixed in, and the fact that the Men's Sweat magazines are getting more prominent placement, packed on the upper magazine rack while THE SATURDAY EVENING POST and SEVENTEEN issues are on the lower rack (along with a German "film revue" magazine, not altogether unlikely to have been of the Kind Men Like...or at least to have some photos that wouldn't appear in a US film magazine of the era), that this newsstand was in a tobacco shop or a truck stop in or around Detroit; the slide's purchaser/Facebook poster Kevin Brubaker thought it was shot in February 1965, but it was probably taken, as The Saturday Evening Post on the stand is the 12 December issue, in the first week of December 1964 (see last photo below).


































All the 1964 issues...December at bottom right...
Well...so much for inoffensive, as late as 1964, when Negro was beginning to
 give way to Black as the value-neutral/non-pejorative term for African-Americans...












































Oddly enough, I call Margolin Early Media Crush of Mine (she's not the cover model...
who also has a coterie following still...)










































































Turns out this, the 12 December 1964 issue, of SEP was the issue on sale here...
so, probably, the photo was taken in the first week of December...







































This issue of SEP's contents: 
...almost a pity it wasn't the next issue, which featured a short story by Gina Berriault, previously blogged about here...then again, J. B. Priestley has gotten some attention here...
Posted by at 9 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Friday, November 21, 2014

FFB: QUARK/4 edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker (Popular Library 1971); THE SATURDAY EVENING POST for January 25, 1969

Forty-five years ago, more or less...The Saturday Evening Post hadn't quite collapsed, though it would soon (to be reborn as an infrequent nostalgia magazine, rather than the Last truly general-interest magazine that wasn't a collection of reprints). Over at Paperback Library, not the most prominent house in the well-established field, a young married couple who had already made serious literary reputations for themselves (and who were utterly open about being bisexual well before the Bowies were to make it futuristically chic for masses a half-decade later) were preparing the first volume of a new anthology series devoted to speculative fiction, mostly sf and fantasy but in the same wheelhouse as such avant garde publications as Evergreen Review, New Directions Quarterly and, in fantastic fiction, New Worlds, Orbit, and Dangerous Visions.  Quark would produce four quarterly volumes in a year.  This last is led off by a brief, interesting editorial, and one of the more free-form, quasi-autobiographical (writer in Greenwich Village) stories that Avram Davidson was writing in those years, such as "Selectra Six-Ten" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1970) and, toward the end of this run, "Hark! Was That the Squeal of an Angry Thoat?" (Fantastic, December 1977), discursive asides and wordplay run rampant (a minor if notable example is that a James Baldwin analog becomes Jacobo Gaintestes here)...this particular story is more pleasant than major, and has yet to be reprinted (unlike those better examples), but was more than enough to compell me to read this part of the book first, even given all the tumult in progress around me at the moment.  The Charles Platt choose your own adventures in the counterculture cartoon is amusing enough, as well...I will return to this book for the other work soon.

 Quark/4 ed. Samuel R. Delany & Marilyn Hacker (Paperback Library 66-658, Aug ’71, $1.25, 240pp, pb, cover by Martin Last)
Meanwhile, that issue of the SEP referred to above features not only a cover story on Barney Rosset, he of the aforementioned Evergreen Review and Grove Press and its offshoots, then in full flower, but also Joan Didion mulling over the student strikes and Hayakawa/Reagan/Unruh response at San Francisco State and related campuses, Gary Wills on the private Richard Nixon (about to be inaugurated), Tom Wicker on the outgoing LBJ, Arthur Miller hanging with more upfront criminals, and assorted other items of continued pertinence. One does see why Lewis Lapham was striving to make his Harper's as much as possible a slightly less demotic echo of the SEP of this era.


For today's more thorough reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
Posted by at 3 comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)