Welcome to Dusty Mags
I've been collecting obscure girly mags for fifteen years and it finally occurred to me that keeping them in boxes in my garage isn't really preserving anything. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, my wife tosses them and that's it. Another collection in a dumpster.
So here we are. Dusty Mags. A place to put the scans where people can actually see them.
What This Is
This site is specifically about the little magazines. Not Playboy, not Penthouse, not Hustler—the ones everybody knows. I'm talking about the regional stuff. The gentleman's magazines that were published by one or two guys in a small office somewhere, printed a few thousand copies, and sold them within a hundred miles of where they were printed. Most of them lasted five, ten, maybe fifteen years before folding. Almost none of them were archived by anyone.
I find them at estate sales, storage unit auctions, flea markets, thrift stores, and eBay. Mostly eBay, if I'm honest. I've got a buddy in Arizona who hits swap meets for me. Another friend in the Midwest who checks junk shops whenever he's road-tripping. When they find something weird that they've never heard of, they text me. That's how half my collection was built.
I scan them cover to cover—every page, including the ads. Especially the ads. The ads in these things are incredible. Local car dealerships, fishing outfitters, regional beer brands, timber companies. You can tell exactly where and when a magazine was published just from the ads. It's like looking through a window into a version of America that doesn't exist anymore.
The First Title: Hardwood Magazine
We're launching with Hardwood Magazine, a gentleman's magazine out of Portland, Oregon that ran from 1971 to 1974. I got lucky with this one—I acquired the complete archive from the publisher's estate. Every issue, plus negatives, production materials, correspondence. The whole story of a little magazine from the Pacific Northwest that nobody outside the I-5 corridor ever heard of.
The full story of how I found it is in my post about the Whitfield Estate.
What's Coming
More titles, as I get them scanned. I've got a couple of Southern California titles in the queue and I'm tracking down leads on a few others. The scanning takes time—each issue is 40-60 pages at 300 DPI, and some of the older copies need conservation work first. But I'd rather do it right than rush it.
If you're sitting on a collection of old magazines that you've never seen mentioned anywhere online—the kind of thing where you Google the title and get zero results—I want to hear from you. Those are exactly the magazines that need to be preserved before they're gone.
— Glenn