JF Ptak Science Books LLC
It seems to me as though I have quite a few of these old subscription or mail-back forms from the 1930's, '40's and 1950's. In the spirit of Don Novello (aka Father Guido Sarducci) I thought that I'd start sending some of these little buggers back out, just to see what happens with them on the other end. I have my doubts that there are very many pieces of antique mail making their way through the labyrinth of the U.S. Postal System, so perhaps it will give some of those folks in blue a little something to talk about. Or not. And so I put my $3.65 in the little envelope for a year's subscription to the fine LIFE magazine--if I could get into the Wayback machine, I'd enjoy 52 issues of LIFE in 1940 for just a few dollars. Unfortuantely LIFE stopped being a weekly in 1972 and then sputtered along as a much-changed monthly for several decades until it completely left the track in 2007.
It was an interesting magazine to be sure, though not without its
problems. For example, I looked through every page of LIFE from 1939
to 1945 and my impression was that there wasn't all that much war
reporting in the thing until everything heated up (including America, finally) in
mid-1942. (And by "very much" I mean, well, that I just expected more in the magazine about the World War than I was seeing, space being taken up by nonsense and Liliputian interests rather than the global conflict.) Up to that point there seems to have been far more non-war
words/images than war-related. Even in 1942 there was more adveritising
using men-in-uniform than there were actual stories depicting fighting
men. Things changed quite a bit in the magazine as the war became more
"real" for the U.S. in 1943; still, the reporting didn't come close to
that of the London-based Illustrated London News, where the war was
real since 1940. This is hardly scientific, only an impression, but
having looked at the entire war coverage in LIFE and Illus London News I am left with a lingering impression of a remarkable difference between the two (similar) magazines. More still for the Illustrirte
Zeitung (Leipzig), but that's another story. Still the use of
men-in-uniform to sell cigarettes or steel or whatever is pretty
bothersome to me--there was a lot of that going on in LIFE, not so much
at all in ILN, and almost none in the Illustrite Zeitung.
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