Magazines

Mad About the Sixties: The Best of the Decade (Mad about the Sixties)

When American kids of a certain vintage--Bill Clinton, for example, but not Bob Dole--put down their childish things, they picked up MAD magazine. It didn't leave their hands until adulthood hit, and maybe after. The magazine ain't what it used to be, so it's easy to forget how keen it once was. MAD About the Sixties is a long-overdue collection of material from that seminal humor magazine's salad days. It's a welcome reminder that when MAD was good, it was very, very good: it featured solid writing coupled with great art, month after month. The movie and television parodies ("Bats-Man," "Star Blech") are sure to be a hit, whether you saw the originals the first time around or as reruns. While it helps to have lived through the era--particularly for the ad parodies--there's enough generic daffiness in MAD About the Sixties to satisfy the reader who never saw Wings, much less Paul McCartney's other band.

Mad About the Seventies: The Best of the Decade

COLLECTIBLE MAGAZINES: Identification and Price Guide, 2e (Collectible Magazines)

  The Essential Guide to American Magazines

Here is the only guide on the market to all major categories of general circulation American magazines from 1880 to 1999. With up- to values on thousands of magazines, plus more than 550 new photos of collectible magazine covers, this book is a must for every collector. It includes:

• Current values for popular magazines, from National Geographic to Life, Rolling Stone, a and Tiger Beat
• Coverage of all movie, TV, and entertainment magazines,
• with extensive listings for TV/Guide and People
• Complete listings for every monster, science fiction,
• and horror magazine, from Famous Monsters of Filmland
• and Horror Tales to Starlog
• Values for adult magazines, including Playboy, High Society, and Penthouse, along with Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Special Editions, plus a list of the most collectible females, such as Samantha Fox and Cindy Crawford
• A new chapter on Karate and Wrestling magazines
• Dozens of recent magazines with collectible celebrity covers,
• including Xena and TheX-Files
• Tips on buying, selling, and starting a collection
• Grading information
• Advice for buying and selling over the Internet

The American Magazine

Good Days and Mad: A Hysterical Tour Behind the Scenes at Mad Magazine

Inside the Playboy Mansion: If You Don't Swing, Don't Ring

Webworks: e-zines: Explore On-Line Magazine Design

Meet the people who make it their business to create electronic magazines on the web. Here you'll find an international showcase of e-zine designs that work. Whether translated from print or created purely for online viewing, these e-zines offer standout solutions to the enormous challenge of designing information and holding the reader's attention online. From mass-media stalwarts, such as Time and Fortune, to renegade upstarts like Suck and Urban 75, WebWorks: e-Zines identifies what makes an e-zine success.

Learn about e-zine structure and design, from start-up and promotion theory to the nuts-and-bolts layout of departments and columns. Discover innovative techniques for enticing readers participation and generating subscriptions. Find common sense tips on navigation, programs, and site architecture.

Packed with advice and inspiration from top e-zine staff, this volume is the essential resource for designers, marketers, and internet enthusiasts around the world. Each case study introduces you to the designers who are inventing the future, giving you a direct pipeline into today's web world.

Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History

Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines

Penzler Pick, November 2001: Pulp magazines reigned for about a quarter of a century as the most popular entertainment medium in America. They were cheaply produced and, during the Great Depression, were blessedly cheap to buy, generally a dime.

And they were plentiful. After a low-key beginning, when a few magazines displayed their tasteful covers to an appreciative readership, their success spawned countless competitors. The covers became more and more garish, and promised ever greater excitement. Western covers went from an illustration of an Indian gently paddling his canoe to furious cattle stampedes, a huge gang of obviously ferocious savages attacking a defenseless family, and depictions of shootouts in every conceivable locale. Mystery covers went from showing a cop on the beat to villainous thugs tearing the clothes off a helpless young woman (most frequently a generously endowed young blonde) or any other sort of action that promised the reader endless excitement.

And they delivered. Pulp writers knew how to write thrilling stories and books. Many of the best went on to extremely successful careers in book form. Dashiell Hammett wrote most of his stories and novels for the pulps, and he is now recognized as one of the most influential fiction writers of the 20th century. Raymond Chandler, too, wrote stories for the pulps and is frequently conceded to be the great mystery writer of the 20th century.

Pulps became more and more specialized as their numbers increased, soon appealing to fans of jungle stories, science fiction, fantasy, railroad stories, romances, Westerns, Western romances, aviation, the Foreign Legion, engineering, the outdoors, courtrooms, Wall Street, newspapers, firefighters, and so on. Now there is a new book that recalls that Golden Age of the pulp magazines (roughly 1920-1945) with a knowledgeable and nicely written text that covers all the highlights of the major magazines and the major writers, who are sometimes remembered today and, alas, sometimes not.

And there are those fabulous covers! Magnificently produced in Hong Kong, Pulp Culture is a genuine bargain. Here are the Shadow, Max Brand, Talbot Mundy, Erle Stanley Gardner, Black Mask, Sax Rohmer and Fu Manchu, C.S. Forester, and Captain Horatio Hornblower, Doc Savage, the Phantom Detective, and on and on.

For the old codgers among us, this gorgeous book will produce a happy trip down memory lane. Younger readers, eat your heart out. It will show you what you missed in a time of great storytelling that today's television shows can't ever match. --Otto Penzler

From its origins in the late nineteenth century, when adventure stories reigned, through almost six decades of slinking sleuths, galloping ghouls, nitty-gritty gals, and invincible warriors, the pulp magazine transported readers to new frontiers of the mind. The proving ground for scores of writers and illustrators who went on to achieve great fame, these publications helped popularize authors such as Dashiell Hammett, Ray Bradbury, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Taken collectively, they now provide a panorama of some sixty years of illustration and social commentary. Hailed as "lush" by the New York Times, this is the most comprehensive compilation ever published on the subject. Winner of the "Pop Culture Book of the Year" by the Independent Publisher's Association, it is a must for graphic artists, fiction lovers, and anyone who appreciates the art of pulp fiction's golden age.

The Editor in Chief: A Practical Management Guide for Magazine Editors