My Life in Periodicals

When I was seven or eight years old, I was given a subscription (by whom?) to a children's magazine (which one?) Was it my older brother who said, "you still reading that magazine for babies?" Always susceptible to public criticism, I soon lost interest in the publication. Since then, I've subscribed and unsubscribed to dozens of periodicals. Here are some that I remember. In my teens, Mad Magazine, of which I was a serious enthusiast, and had been since Mad's Harvey Kurtzman comic book days. Also, Sport Magazine -- a precursor of SI. And various pulp sci fi mags -- Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction and probably others that came and went. In the '60s, political magazines: The Reporter, The Nation, and before it went totally wrong, The New Republic. A decade later, Local Population Studies, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, The Psychohistorical Review, The History of Childhood Quarterly. When I became serious about Shakespeare, I was an assiduous collector of the Shakespeare Quarterly and the Shakespeare Newsletter and Shakespeare Research and Opportunities and the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter. Closely related: English Literary Renaissance and the George Herbert Journal (of which I at one time owned every issue). In the '70s or '80s, Organic Gardening (sample title -- "How We Grew Papayas on our Vermont Hillside Using Organic Methods and Faith in God"); later, Fine Gardening (sample title: "How We Converted a Defunct Brewery into an Extremely Expensive Bed-and-Breakfast Complete with a Replica of an 18th-century Capability Brown Landscape"). At various times: Scientific American, Science News, Bluebirds Across Vermont, the newsletter of the Southern Vermont Dairy Goat Association, One Two Three Four (a magazine briefly in existence that concerned itself with the early history of rock and roll), the Atlantic, The Skeptical inquirer. Newspapers: The New York Times, United Opinion (nowadays the Journal-Opinion), Behind the Times, the Daily Camera. Nowadays:  Harvard Magazine, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Northern Forests.

I'm sure there must be many others that I can no longer recall.   

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[Otis Jefferson Brown]

Uncle Wiggily?