Magazines

Because of the vast number of magazines covered by this site (over 9000 at last count) and the varying degrees of interest that different magazines command, I have attempted to structure this part of the web site so that everyone (within reason) can get rapid access to the information they are looking for.

For general browsing, or to locate a particular magazine by name, the best place to start is the top level index to All Magazines as this includes all the magazines and the story papers in the list. However, if you are interested in a particular genre/style of magazine, there are also twelve additional subsets:

Genre Magazines:These are fundamentally the magazines I started out to list – all the key genre magazines and other pulp magazines in which genre authors are likely to have appeared. It covers about 2000 magazines.
Pulp Magazines: This is an attempt to list all pulp magazines (although the attribution is highly debatable in some cases).
Science Fiction, Fantasy and Weird Fiction Magazines:This lists only those magazines that contain a high proportion of SF, Fantasy, Horror, Ghost or Supernatural stories.
Crime, Mystery & Gangster Fiction Magazines:This lists only those magazines that contain a high proportion of Crime, Mystery, Detective, and/or Gangster stories.
Adventure, War, and Espionage Fiction Magazines:This lists only those magazines that contain a high proportion of Adventure, War, Espionage and/or Aviation stories.
Western and Frontier Fiction Magazines:This lists only those magazines that contain a high proportion of Western and Frontier stories and was primarily put together for, and with the assistance of, the members of the WesternPulps mailing list.
Sports Fiction Magazines:This lists only those magazines that contain a high proportion of Sports stories.
Love Story Magazines:This lists only those magazines that contain a high proportion of Love/Romance stories.
Men's Magazines:This lists only those magazines aimed primarily at a male audience, including the saucy/spicy titles from the 1920's & 1930's, the men's adventure magazines from the 1940's & 1950's, and the more explicit magazines of more recent decades.
Little Magazines:This lists only those magazines that are considered to be "little", "literary" or "regional" magazines.
Story Papers:This set includes all the story papers, dime novels and/or libraries in the list and is based mainly on the research done by Steve Holland and Demian Katz.
Fiction Magazines:This set includes all the fiction magazines, excluding story papers, in the list (currently about 4000) and is primarily of interest to the enthusiasts on the FictionMags mailing list.

Similarly, if you are interested in magazines published in a particular country, there are a further five subsets:

Magazines published in the USA
Magazines published in the UK and Ireland
Magazines published in Australia and New Zealand
Magazines published in Canada
Magazines published in Other Countries

In a number of cases I've had to guess at the contents of a magazine I did not recognise, and/or the country in which it was published (particularly with some of the more recent online magazines for whom country boundaries are much less relevant), so there could well be some errors in attribution and/or country – please feel free to let me know of any mistakes I have made.

In each list, the magazine data is subdivided into four hierarchical levels providing more and more detail about fewer and fewer magazines. These levels are as follows:

Top Level:This simply provides a single-page table of contents to the next level down to facilitate rapid access to a given magazine.
Magazine Lists: These pages contain a single line for each magazine title, listing:
- The magazine title. Note that an attempt has been made to group together all variant titles of a given magazine, with cross-references from each title to the main entry.
- Details (as far as is known) of the range of issues for which the magazine was published.
- Details of up to two magazine indexes that index some or all of the contents of the magazine in question. The magazine indexes themselves, apart for those that form part of the FictionMags Index Family, are listed on a separate page (in either case, the index is hyperlinked from the lists).
- Notes on the coverage of the indexes (if incomplete), with particular emphasis on missing issues, together with a link to the illustrated checklist for the magazine, where one is available.
Magazine Data: Each of the magazines in the magazine lists is hyperlinked to a page containing further details of the magazine. The level of detail provided varies widely from magazine to magazine, partly due to the limited information available and partly due to the sheer volume of information that needs to be entered.
Magazine Images: The magazine data pages (and issue checklists) contain thumbnail cover scans of as many of the magazines as I have images for; these are also hyper-linked to larger versions of the same cover scans – typically limited to 400 pixels wide and about 60Kb in size, although this varies widely from magazine to magazine.

Illustrated Checklists are provided for about 3850 of the more popular magazines (such as pulp magazines and SF/Fantasy magazines). Each contains a full checklist of all known issues of the magazine in question, illustrated, where possible, with thumbnail cover scans of each issue (which, as always, may be "clicked" to display a larger cover image). As mentioned above, this are linked from both the Magazine List and Magazine Data pages for the magazines in question. In addition, there are a series of summary pages for the key members of the FictionMags Index Family. For a small number of magazines (such as Argosy and New Worlds) these pages also contain detailed discussions of the magazines in question. In due course I would like to add similar information for all magazines but, at the current rate, this will take about another 200 years.

In some extreme cases (e.g. Argosy with over 2500 issues) I have split the checklists across multiple pages, but I have tried to avoid this. Note that these pages, like the rest of the site, are optimised for a display resolution of 1024x768 although they should display reasonably on lower resolutions. There are also a small number of checklists that are organised by publisher rather than genre:

Selected fiction magazines published by Gerald G. Swan
Selected fiction magazines published by John Spencer
Selected fiction magazines published by The World's Work

Finally, there are five additional resources that might be of interest:

Image Gallery: This provides a set of linked pages similar to the indexes above, but just displays the cover images for the magazines. The primary use of this is to display additional cover images for magazines that do not (yet) have illustrated checklists (as the magazine data pages typically display a maximum of six covers), but may also be of interest to those whose interest is mainly in the artwork on the magazines rather than the contents. Note that, where a magazine does have an illustrated checklist, this page will contain a link to the checklist rather than duplicate all the cover scans (which run into the thousands for some magazines).
New/Improved Images: This page simply contains a display of all the new and improved images in the latest upload (in two separate sections). As usual, each thumbnail can be clicked through to the full image.
Unrecognised Cover Images: This page displays a number of cover scans that I have acquired over the years but which I can't pin down. Any help in identifying these would be welcome.
Current Magazines: This contains all those magazines that are still being published (for any budding, or actual, authors among you), together with website/e-mail links (where known). As few magazines formally announce their termination, I have used a rule of thumb here and elsewhere that a magazine that has not published an issue for at least 3 years should be considered defunct. Some such magazines do revive, and will be reinstated as soon as they do, but this is the exception rather than the rule.
Missing Indexes: This summarises all the pulp/genre magazines that have, so far, not been indexed (and for which indexes are not in progress), as well as identifying the missing issues where an existing index is incomplete. Your assistance in filling in these gaps would be most welcome!