Gather up kids because I want to tell you a story. Back in the olden days, before the internet, the best way to get information and news about whatever strange niche tickled your fancy was the magazine. It was a magnificent thing. Thick or thin, nerdy or not, glossy or cheap, every so often the magazine would come to a place near you where it’s cover would beckon with seductive promises of the contents inside. And lo, kids, they were everywhere. Doctor’s offices, the barber shop. The ends of checkout lines and an entire aisle on the bookstore filled with variety to quench tastes both moderate and vulgar.
Now, we know how the story ends, with me getting a pop-up on the magazine’s website, telling me that I could have a full year of Magazines’ for only $12 instead of the $90 they used to charge. Nevermind the fact that nobody has paid that much for a magazine subscription since Obama was in office. I don’t know anyone who still buys a paper magazine. Even the ones that are still available as a physical file.
Nevertheless, all this remembering about the times when I had to wait a month to see blurry spy shots of a bunch of tarp that was probably a new car has a similarly nostalgic origin. A couple of weeks ago I happened upon one of Cycle World Magazines’ best articles. It’s not actually the March 1995 “Review” of the Ducati 900 SuperSport as penned by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. It’s actually a piece a little over ten years after that, May 2005, after Dr. Thompson had decided that he’d had just about all that he could stand of this plane of existence and proceeded to do something about that, presumably not expecting anything but a good night’s sleep. In this editorial, Cycle World’s Editor-in-Chief David Edwards informs their readers what they probably already know of Dr. Thompson’s fate. As well as give an insider scoop on how it was to work with the gonzo one from the other side of the publishing business. In short, exactly as you’d imagine it would be.
But the Cycle World’s website has to have one of the best features I’ve ever seen. As well as the transcription of the article, which should make it trivially easy to have whatever device you own read its insight to you, there’s a high-res scan of the page itself as it was back when the only way you could see it for more than a minute was by buying the magazine. Wonderful (and now, much to my distress, retro) advertising for the first-gen Toyota Tundra and all. It took me back, which is amazing as I wasn’t into motorcycles back then. That’s the power of the olden magazines. Their ability to capture a time in such a way that you can, for a moment, stand in it.
Meanwhile, Car and Driver botched their site so bad that the seminal “Car Buying is easy when Fido barks the numbers” is missing about a third of its content. Maybe the next refresh cycle will get those back.
