Sunday, July 02, 2006

'Movie' magazines.

I used to deal in collectible magazines, mostly entertainment and fashion. I always found it fascinating the evolution of movie magazines. In the 20's, 30's and 40's they were basically about the movies themselves with some articles on the stars. Starting in the 50's they started to be more about the stars and got more gossipy. This trend accelerated in the 60's and by the 70's we had scandal mags like Rona Barrett's Hollywood. Then as prices of glossy magazines increased the newsprint tabloids like the Star took over since they were cheaper. In the last few years the prices of the newsprint versions increased enough that the tabloids went back to glossy magazines.
For Instance the Star started as a very large b/w tabloid, then turned color, then started to shrink, when it got about as small as it could the price started going up. Recently it got to the point the price was too high for a newsprint tabloid so it went back to glossy paper.
I'll put up some pics to illustrate the progression. I don't have scans of the recent stuff because I shut the business down a couple years ago. The Canadian Dollar went up and ebay saturated the market so it wasn't worth doing any more. If anyone has any reason to be interested I have scans over of 20,000 magazine covers. I sold a crapload of magazines over the years.


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