Useful and Interesting Links

If you liked what we're doing here, you may find these other sites of interest. We have no connection with these sites (other than an appreciation of the material they have on the site itself) and provide no warranty of any kind about them. You're on your own.

Non-Commercial and Educational Sites

The FictionMags Index to thousands of magazine issue contents, often with cover art credits

The Pulp Gallery has thousands of pulp magazine covers online for you to enjoy.

Steven Lamazow, collector and bibliographer, now has a blog about Magazine History, with cover pictures and interesting essays.

The Gallery of Graphic Design is an archive of thousands of advertising pages from American magazines 1930-69. Behind its deceptively simple home page is a visual database that you can search in several different ways: product class, keyword, magazine, advertiser, and so on. There is no editorial information on the site to tell you who is doing it or why, but WHOIS has the requisite data.

Old Magazine Articles has interesting old magazine articles, and some cover images even. The articles are reproduced as scans packaged as PDF, and some are good and some are not so good. But the site is well worth spending a lot of time on.

Puzzles made from pictures, a couple dozen of them using cover images from here. Here's one. Here's another.

Artist Paul Giambarba has written a large number of fascinating essays on famous artists and illustrators, with extensive examples from their work, for his blog 100 Years of Illustration and Design. Here's an example: detail analysis of the pen and ink work of Harry Fenn.

Nancy Gluck writes about American silverplate on her website, which includes a number of relevant ads, using wonderful art by some of the great illustrators, and taken from vintage magazines.

The Modern Mechanix site has all kinds of wonderful material reprinted from the popular science and technology magazines of the 20's, 30's, and later. There's even a special section devoted to the covers of these magazines, including plenty of them we don't have.

Not about magazines, but thematically related: pictures from old books. Two sites we know about: (1) Liam's "Pictures from Old Books" and (2) Lucilius' "Old Book Illustrations". Wait, here's another: BibliOdyssey on Blogspot. Here's one with pictures of literally everything, in French.

Jack Raglin has posted a number of Bolles covers and other art, from FILM FUN and other magazines, on Flickr.

Also on Flickr you can find the Vintage Magazines Pool.

Nick Chase's website with cover images and contents listings for the hundreds of pulps and other magazines he's bought in the last couple of years.

A couple of interesting blogs about illustration art: Lief Peng's Blog, and David Apatoff's Blog.

A tribute site about FILM FUN created by Yahia Zein Eddin, with most of the covers, beginning in the early 1920's and continuing to its last year.

A site in tribute to artist Fletcher C. Ransom, whose work appeared in dozens of magazines and hundreds of other venues in the period from the 1890's to the middle decades of the 20th century. Onsite and in direct links are a large number of scans of his work.

Phil Stephenson-Payne's "Galactic Central"—the Big List of magazines which print or printed fiction, with publishing information and sample cover images. This list engulfs and incorporates some earlier lists by other madmen, and its value cannot be overstated.

AND: Phil has lately been doing visual checklists for a large number of pulps, including pulp cover images thumbnailed in their proper calendar slots. A fabulous resource. We've sent him plenty of images for this; every bit helps.

Noosfere is a French site with an astonishing collection of science-fiction and fantasy magazine and book cover images. Go even if you do not speak any French. It is wonderful.

A tribute to ST. NICHOLAS magazine, with history, covers, articles, etc. that is truly a labor of love.

A amazing website, Nostalgiaville at gono.com maintains a vast directory of magazine cover images as well as plenty of other examples of historic art and ephemera. It's sort of run as part of their collectibles business (beverage containers and art a specialty) but obviously it's actually a labor of love.

Terry Gibbons' Visual Index of Science Fiction Cover Art gives the cover images of hundreds of science fiction magazines, with special attention to British/Commonwealth titles. VISCO is another excellent volunteer operation: one person's obsession and contributions of images from countless others.

A cover-image site with 50,000 comic book covers. Adam Selvidge is true and dedicated.

Gerald Grow, Professor of Magazine Journalism at Florida A&M University, has an interesting essay online about the history and development of magazine cover art. Some great illustrative examples, too!

The "American Art Archives" is full of information about illustrators, and images of their works. Their huge selection of artists biographies is a great place to learn something about an artist you've just discovered. I think Thomas is running this as a business, but we'll list it here in the educational section because it gives so much. Gotta check it out.

a short history of EVERYBODY'S MAGAZINE, with particular attention to its career in muckraking journalism in the early 20th century, and many short biographies of contributors (e.g. Upton Sinclair). Other links go to other magazine histories, such as McCLURE'S. Lots to see here.

A tribute site dedicated to the work of artist Fletcher C. Ransom, whose work appeared in many American magazines in the early part of the 20th century.

A tribute site for artist Norm Saunders, whose work appeared on both mainstream and pulp magazines (not to mention books and trading cards).

A biography of Francis Bellamy, who worked at several of these magazines including YOUTH'S COMPANION, ILLUSTRATED AMERICAN, and EVERYBODY'S.

A site dedicated to the art of Frank R. Paul, famous for his paintings for Hugo Gernsback's science fiction and science/mechanics titles.

The National Museum of American Illustration, a private museum in Newport, Rhode Island. It specializes in illustrators and artists, including many made famous in magazine art of our period. It's a bit on the commercial side, but one can't argue with its goals. They have a good page of links for further information on illustration art and artists.

The Web Gallery of Art isn't about magazine art; it describes itself as "a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods (1150-1800), currently containing over 11,000 reproductions." A fantastic resource, and important to understanding much of what you'll see on this site.

An interesting article on CAPT. BILLY'S WHIZ-BANG, which you've heard about only because it's mentioned in the "Trouble" song from "The Music Man." We'll have some issues up here in a while.

Syracuse University has a set of the covers from the early film fan magazine PICTURE PLAY, 1919-1928. A great thing to do, though the online images are only 300 pixels high and thus not very good. (You can get bigger images directly from the University.) It's part of their digital library based on the Street and Smith archives. While it mostly covers dime novels, they also have (small) images of the covers from the pulp magazine THE WHISPERER and the dime weekly BOWERY BOY LIBRARY.

MAD MAGAZINE: Every cover from the first 1952 comic-book edition. MAD affected our culture in ways we won't discover for another hundred years. A work of art by Doug Gilford.

Pulp covers, provided by a variety of enthusiasts, and hosted on an Epson photo site. Lots of great stuff!

Covers from a number of issues of SUNSET magazine, from all phases of its history; part of a history project on the magazine at Stanford University.

A tribute site to artist Joseph A. Maturo. No, you've not heard of him; but you've probably seen his work.

Lost Highways' tribute site and gallery for visionary artist Arthur Radebaugh.

Ellis Parker Butler, best known for "Pigs Is Pigs," was the author of hundreds of articles and stories in all the best magazines 1896-1935. A great tribute site, with dozens of examples of his writing, and tons of magazine covers from the issues they appeared in.

Patty Kennington has a personal website with a very nice set of links to sites about the history of graphic art.

BOY'S LIFE in the 20's and 30's honored with gallery and index (not complete) by steve@trussel.com.

Commercial Sites and Dealers

The best place to shop for old magazines is eBay. Or go directly to their listings for collectible magazines.

DiscountMags.com offers hundreds of magazine subscriptions at greatly discounted rates.

Collectorsweekly.com has begun a section on collecting magazines. This is a large and ambitious site with lots of material on many different kinds of collecting, including a variety of paper and ephemera, in addition to magazines. They've also chosen MagazineArt.org as the first magazine-related website to be one of the "best collector sites for our Hall of Fame." Sounds fine to us.

For Pulp magazine books, reprints, and related materials, start at Adventure House. John Gunnison has been collecting pulps for a long time, and publishes bibliographies, biographies, story collections, and reprints that you will find fascinating.

Ephemera dealer The Paper Trail has a good selection of magazine covers as well as other printed illustration material of all kinds.

The Leeflang Archives are a good source of vintage magazines on eBay and via direct sales.

The Advertising Archives is a UK company that collects and sells prints, pages, and images from advertising, especially magazine advertising. You have to register to look at their site, but registration is free. Once on the site you can go to the "Gallery" and view a number of pages of small thumbnails of ads and covers, or search using keywords or descriptive search terms to bring up ads that satisfy those terms.

Ken Steacy, an author/illustrator who worked for many years in the comics industry, is shepherding dozens of new and reissue art and illustration collections into print through his publishing company Ken Steacy Publishing. Click on the left column items and you'll see a long list of already-published and projected volumes.

Sharon Kahn is selling off their comics collection and has an excellent site showing the scans of the comic covers at Toonerville.net. Look for her theme collections, such as "Entirely Gratuitous Gorillas" and "Vaguely Naughty" bondage and menace covers.

Bud Plant Illustrated Books sells books about famous artists and illustrators, and has well-done short illustrated biographies of over a hundred of them. You can buy books on the BPIB sites too, though we'd prefer you buy them via our link to Amazon.

OldImprints.com sells vintage magazines and exchanges links with us (so, go check them out).

A number of covers from VOGUE, VANITY FAIR, HOUSE AND GARDEN, and GOURMET magazines are online at the Condé Nast website. They want to sell prints etc.

All the covers from ESQUIRE MAGAZINE 1933-present are now online at their cover gallery!

Also by steve@trussel.com: a nice links page to dealers in back-issue magazines (and to used and rare book dealers).

HarpWeek.com, a site which reissues historical material from HARPER'S WEEKLY, has many free items and is well worth a look.

Magazine ad sellers take the magazines apart and sell individual pages; this is how you can get an original "Coke" ad for your wall. Most old magazines sell on eBay for five or ten dollars, but plenty of individual ads are also sold there, as single pages, for the same amount. What the ad seller does for you is select the ad, catalog it, and make it available for you in a way you can find it. If you figure out the time it takes to buy it, scan it, and list it, the seller isn't making that many dollars an hour. For some magazines it would be tragic to tear them apart; but 1960's issues of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC have no higher calling. This seller is scanning magazine covers for our website, and deserves a mention here.

Artella, which describes itself as "a magazine and support network for writers, artists, and creative spirits," has mostly commercial products but quite a lot of interesting other information and stuff at its web site. They asked for a link exchange and seem worth it.

The Illustrated Gallery, a commercial art gallery specializing in cover paintings and interior illustrations from magazines and other publications.

Illustration House, a commercial art gallery specializing in illustrations such as often appeared in magazines.

Norm Platnick writes collector's guides to the art of famous illustrators, and his website has some background information on the magazines in which they appeared.

POPULAR MECHANICS cover images—the entire set is on the web here.