Magazine Reading

I'll take a quick look at any magazine that comes my way now, but in my youth I was crazy for magazines just as I was for encyclopedias, dictionaries, manuals, handbooks, catalogs and maps. I'd collect an alarming number of magazines, getting bundles of old ones at The Salvation Army Store for a dime apiece. Sometimes the clerk just wanted to get rid of the bundles and would ask me to take as many as I could carry for free. I had a long list of favorites that included Scientific American, Redbook, Life, Psychology Today, Ms., Cosmopolitan, Time, Business Week, Popular Mechanics, and many others. I'd read the short fiction in Redbook, the formulaic tales of woe in True Story, look at all the advertising in the old magazines from the 1950's, and read about shipwrecks and polar bears in National Geographic. If I was stuck on a slow subway train an essay on cutworms became fascinating.