Owing to my father's and mother's professions, my brother and I grew up in a house filled w/ copies of the magazines
Scientific American and
Science (our father, a physicist, never tossed even a single issue and still EVERY issue he ever received going back to the late 1940s or (very) early 1950s, before we were born. He also has kept every issue ever received of various "scholarly journals" pertaining to physics, chemistry, nuclear science, etc., but these publications I do not regard as "magazines" in the vein of
Science and
Scientific American. Our mother's weekly/monthly magazines included
National Geographic,
The New York Review Of Books,
The New Yorker, and
American Educator. Unlike the old man she did not keep every issue (not even NG -- I know: a shock!), which she too had been receiving since before we were born. @ some point in the 1970s she also subscribed to
Chicago magazine. Of this ^^^ entire mess the ones I liked to look at and even read were
The NY Review Of Books and
The New Yorker. I would have also read
Chicago, but I'd already left home by the time of that subsription.
Certainly were no "music-related" magazine subscriptions to our house, whether music(al) entertainment, music playback gear, etc. My brother and I did not subscribe to but bought as often as we could every issue of
Guitar Player and Mad (note: we also bought the
Mad "paperback" compendiums) magazines. I started buying GP circa 1970 and continued purchasing it monthly through the 1970s, hiatus 1978-1986 (military service out of USA), then picked up buying GP monthly in 1987 until circa 2001-2, @ which point I'd had enough of it. BTW, my brother, who was in The States during the years I was away, continued monthly purchase of GP so I have seen every issue circa 1978-1986. Bought a few issues of the other "large monthly" re: guitars --
Guitar Review (?) -- but never really caught on w/ me that way GP did.
), the other articles and especially the music reviews in Stereo Review turned me on to a lot of albums that remain favorites to this day. Its eventual replacement, Sound and Vision, didn't appeal to me. Audio magazine was also a pleasure--the columnists were all entertaining, and the equipment reviews more substantial. Earlier Stereophile was quite stuffy but also entertaining in its own way; even the overly-wordy album reviews contained a few helpful nuggets. It's a shadow of its former self today and not anywhere near being an enjoyable read today. Even the car magazines have glitzed up and changed--don't like what they've become either.
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