I received a package from Paul Di Filippo today containing a CD of ukulele music. I guess he could hear my caterwauling all the way up in Providence and wants me to stop making noises as if someone or something was being tortured. Sure do appreciate it, Paul.

But that’s not the thing Paul’s trying to tell me that’s sending a message I don’t want to hear.

You see, Paul decorated the envelope with clippings from old magazines and newspapers, the way he always does before popping anything in the mail. The front was a humorous collage, but as for the back, well, that was made up of a single large ad (a version of which seems to have been published in the 1947 Johnson Smith & Co. catalogue) which strongly implied there was something lacking about me.

The ad began:

In your business and social affairs—meeting and dealing with other people—have you the cold, “icicle” type of personality that constantly repels others and keeps them at a distance?

And it only went downhill from there …

(more…)

Arnold Gingrich would like you to subscribe to Esquire, Coronet, and Ken, but only if you’re “a responsible person with a proven credit standing in your community.”

If not … nothing to see here. Move along!

Trying to stay as clutter-free as I can, I picked up a stack of back issues of Brooklyn Magazine, and put them to the “How many of these things do I really need?” test.

First off, let me explain that I mean the Brooklyn Magazine which started publishing in 1978, and as far as I know ended in 1979, not the Brooklyn Magazine that’s currently alive and publishing.

As you can see from the first cover of the earlier Brooklyn Magazine and the most current cover I could find for the more recent incarnation, the new publication is a far classier production than we were ever able to put out.

Saying “we” implies I had a lot to do with the mag, but I didn’t. I wrote a book review for each issue, and did an interview with Fred Pohl, since The Way the Future Was was, after all, about growing up in Brooklyn. But other than that, all I ever had to do with the publishing of the magazine was when I’d pop in to say hello while walking from my apartment off Dahill Road in Bensonhurst to my favorite Chinese restaurant on 65th Street, which is how I discovered the magazine existed in the first place.

Yes, that’s right—as I walked from my apartment to pick up Chinese food one day, I noticed a storefront with the Brooklyn Magazine logo, went in and introduced myself to the editor before the first issue was published, and convinced him that he really needed my book reviews to be a part of it all. (more…)

Mystery Monthly was a topnotch digest that published the likes of Ed McBain, Ron Goulart, and Harlan Ellison. But not me.

The first issue came out in 1976, and the last (or so I believe) in 1977, long before I figured out how to create a short story that would get an editor’s attention.

Or get me anything more than an impersonal rejection slip such as this.

Back on February 14, 1972, I sent two poems—one of which I later published in my high school yearbook—to the Poetry Editor of Ramparts. (Hey, I never said this series was going to be devoted only to genre magazines!) Ramparts was known mostly for its political content, but it published poetry, too, so I foolishly figured I’d give it a shot.

I never had a chance. And if you should ever happen to read those poems (which I hope you never will), you’d agree.

Last night, looking to rest my brain after a heavily wired day, I pulled out my bound volume of the July-October 1898 issues of Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly. About as far as you could get from science fiction, right? You’d think so. But mixed in with articles on “The Irish People at Home” and “The Jews of the United States” was an advertisement in which Jules Verne tells us that “Vin Mariani prolongs life, it is wonderful.”

And the father of science fiction isn’t the only notable to urge us to take a sip of “the popular tonic” that is proclaimed to be “nourishing, strengthening, refreshing.” Also recommending the drink are the man who exonerated Dreyfuss (Emile Zola), the author of The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas), the composer of “Ave Maria” (Charles Gounod), and the designer of the Statue of Liberty (Bartholdi)!

Why, so amazing is this beverage that it’s recommended “For Overworked Men, Delicate Women, Sickly Children.”

Since I’d never heard of this miracle elixir before, I decided to learn a bit about Vin Mariani, which turned out to have been created in 1863 and (as I should have expected) was “made from Bordeaux wine treated with coca leaves.”

In fact, at first it contained 6 milligrams of cocaine per fluid ounce of wine, but when exported to the U.S., that was raised to 7.2 milligrams per ounce.

No wonder it is “recommended by all who try it”!

There’s a full-page ad in the April 1924 issue of The Mentor magazine for Webster’s New International Dictionary, which includes an endorsement from Calvin Coolidge in which he states that the volume “has been the official reference and authority in my office here in Washington during my service as Vice President.” Which means it wasn’t a recent endorsement at the time, since Coolidge had been President since 1923.

The ad also states that thousands of new words had been added since the previous edition, and challenges you to identify 24 of them.

Here are those 24 sample words:

Czecho-Slovak
Murman Coast
daylight saving
junior college
capital ship
duvetyn
mirrorscope
Devil Dog
overhead
hot pursuit
mystery ship
kafirin
Air Council
marquisette
vitamin
Schick test
agrimotor
mudgun
broadcast
Esthonia
aerial cascade
narcism
rotogravure
plasmon

The words or phrases I find most interesting are the ones about new-fangled technologies that are now old, like “rotogravure” and “broadcast.” How amazing once were the inventions we now think ancient!

I recognized 13 of the 24. How about you?

I was looking back through some of my earliest publications and came across this ad for GEnie’s SF & Fantasy RoundTable as printed on the inside front cover of the November 1989 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Raise your hand if you can remember GEnie, or having to “set your modem for half duplex (local echo) at 300 or 1200 baud.” Does anyone still have to do that sort of thing, or have such manipulations gone the way of the buggy whip?

I can’t remember the exact year I joined GEnie, only that it was so early in the online timeline that there really wasn’t any other reason to be online. Back then, GEnie was where all the cool kids hung out … sort of like LJ today.

The solicitation may look primitive now, but it sure seemed tantalizing and state of the art back then.

I can’t wait to see how primitive today’s online interfaces (and the ads for them) will look nineteen years from now!