In June 1979, a 10-year-old from Derry, Ireland, Brian McCloskey, visited some family in Northern Ireland. There, he and his mother went to a newsstand, where she bought him his first issue of Smash Hits, a cheeky London pop magazine that, among the features and reviews, printed lyrics to hit songs. “I was excited because it had the lyric to ‘Up the Junction,’ by Squeeze,” he said. “In 1979, music was taking over football [soccer] as my main interest. My main interest was in the words of songs. Before the Internet, magazines like Smash Hits were the best source for lyrics.”
Thirty-two years on, lyrics websites proliferate — some freeze one’s monitor better than others — and, increasingly, so do old magazines. Smash Hits is one of them, thanks to McCloskey, who purchased every issue of the magazine in Derry until the middle of 1985: “My collection ends with the issue published before Live Aid.”
Two years ago, after sending his back issues to the U.S. from Derry while purging his parents’ attic (“I got rid of as much as possible, including several magazine collections, but not Smash Hits”), McCloskey began scanning each issue and posting the pages on Blogspot. Like Punk Never Happened, named after a classic book on British “new pop” (Culture Club, Duran Duran) by Smash Hits alumnus Dave Rimmer, became a sensation among fans of the period’s music and, just as importantly, the sharp-witted way the magazine covered it. Currently, the site’s Facebook page has 1,300 “likes.”
“There was no real impetus, other than a desire to share,” said McCloskey. “I hoped that people might stumble across the scans and get a kick out of reading them.”
He’s not alone. The Web has seldom been short of scanned magazine pages — be they old interview clippings on movie-star fan pages or a “fashion campaign archive” like The Style Registry — but entire issues are becoming increasingly common. Google Books’ magazines intiative, begun three years ago, has resulted in a burgeoning archive, with back-issue scans of everything from The Advocate to Yoga Journal — not to mention classic titles such as Life, Spy and Spin — available to browse.
That goes alongside private archivists like McCloskey, as well as smaller publications offering their archives to the public. The covers archive on the website for Thrasher, the skateboarders’ bible, leads to scans of every issue between 1981 and 1988 (“Except June 1988, we’re working on it”), while recently the cult New Zealand indie-rock label Flying Nun put a full .pdf of a 1984 fanzine, Garage #1, on its Tumblr page.
A few years ago, it looked like the DVD-ROM was going to be the last refuge of old archives, when venerable titles such as Rolling Stone and Playboy put their catalogs out as a series of discs, housed in DVD-style cases. But the increasing presence of “cloud” data holding is turning public storage into the go-to for private and public collectors alike. And as the price continues to plummet on scanners
and image resolution continues its march to eerie infra-humanness, it’s easier to preserve magazines in their entirety for public display — and more reassuring to look at something obviously touched by human hands, on devices that ideally have not — than ever.
“We started scanning the mag about five or six years ago,” said Greg Smith, the webmaster for Thrasher. “We basically wanted the readers to have all the information at their hands online, and for the foreign people that aren’t able to get the mag, this was a big bonus.”
Thrasher is one of several magazines whose scanned pages frequently end up on one of Tumblr’s scads of image blogs. Smith welcomes the attention. “Anything that hypes up the mag is awesome,” he said. “I remember a guy stole one of our Hall of Meats from our sites, put it up on his YouTube page, and then that clip ended up on Jay Leno. [That’s] the magic of the Internet — go viral or go home.”
Jeannie Hornung of Google Books said the process by which magazines get onto the search-engine behemoth’s archive is “pretty simple, actually: Our magazine partners give us permission and access to their print copies and we digitize them and make them searchable online.”
Google Books has an open form for publishers, authors and rights holders of periodicals to get in touch if they want to put their back issues on the site. That’s how Jeanie Croasmun, managing editor of Ancestry, said her title approached Google: “They asked us to send print versions of our magazine, which we did. A few months later, all issues forwarded to Google Books were available online — very painless, simple process.”
“We’re always talking to publishers about ways to help provide technology and tools that will increase the amount and quality of content online,” Hornung said. “Because we treat our partnerships with magazines as long-term business relationships, we have generally positive, strategic interactions. These are very early days for digital models to emerge on the magazine side, so we’re all about open-ended experimentation with magazine publishers.”
Google doesn’t disclose the archives’ traffic numbers or demographics. Nevertheless, Hornung said, “Titles with a cult following like Spy magazine do find a second life within the archive.” She also said it is popular with students: “We have noticed traffic patterns that align with school semesters. Because the profiles of magazines we’ve digitized are different from what is normally available to students, we do get a considerable amount of use from them. We link back to library catalogs and even authenticate library patrons through to the authorized resource from within university networks.”
Indeed, as the Internet continues to slowly consolidate, even a “lone wolf” operation like McCloskey’s Smash Hits archive has been snapped up. A few weeks ago, an employee of The Internet Archive asked if the organization could share his scans, and McCloskey inquired of a librarian co-worker whether the site was above-board. “She wrote back: ‘It is legit — and it’s fantastic!’ It’s very exciting, but I feel bad I did not do a better job of some of the scanning. I would like to think that maybe some of those old musicians might occasionally do a Web search and find the review of their 45 from 30 years ago.”
Thirty-two years on, lyrics websites proliferate — some freeze one’s monitor better than others — and, increasingly, so do old magazines. Smash Hits is one of them, thanks to McCloskey, who purchased every issue of the magazine in Derry until the middle of 1985: “My collection ends with the issue published before Live Aid.”
Two years ago, after sending his back issues to the U.S. from Derry while purging his parents’ attic (“I got rid of as much as possible, including several magazine collections, but not Smash Hits”), McCloskey began scanning each issue and posting the pages on Blogspot. Like Punk Never Happened, named after a classic book on British “new pop” (Culture Club, Duran Duran) by Smash Hits alumnus Dave Rimmer, became a sensation among fans of the period’s music and, just as importantly, the sharp-witted way the magazine covered it. Currently, the site’s Facebook page has 1,300 “likes.”
“There was no real impetus, other than a desire to share,” said McCloskey. “I hoped that people might stumble across the scans and get a kick out of reading them.”
He’s not alone. The Web has seldom been short of scanned magazine pages — be they old interview clippings on movie-star fan pages or a “fashion campaign archive” like The Style Registry — but entire issues are becoming increasingly common. Google Books’ magazines intiative, begun three years ago, has resulted in a burgeoning archive, with back-issue scans of everything from The Advocate to Yoga Journal — not to mention classic titles such as Life, Spy and Spin — available to browse.
That goes alongside private archivists like McCloskey, as well as smaller publications offering their archives to the public. The covers archive on the website for Thrasher, the skateboarders’ bible, leads to scans of every issue between 1981 and 1988 (“Except June 1988, we’re working on it”), while recently the cult New Zealand indie-rock label Flying Nun put a full .pdf of a 1984 fanzine, Garage #1, on its Tumblr page.
A few years ago, it looked like the DVD-ROM was going to be the last refuge of old archives, when venerable titles such as Rolling Stone and Playboy put their catalogs out as a series of discs, housed in DVD-style cases. But the increasing presence of “cloud” data holding is turning public storage into the go-to for private and public collectors alike. And as the price continues to plummet on scanners
and image resolution continues its march to eerie infra-humanness, it’s easier to preserve magazines in their entirety for public display — and more reassuring to look at something obviously touched by human hands, on devices that ideally have not — than ever.
“We started scanning the mag about five or six years ago,” said Greg Smith, the webmaster for Thrasher. “We basically wanted the readers to have all the information at their hands online, and for the foreign people that aren’t able to get the mag, this was a big bonus.”
Thrasher is one of several magazines whose scanned pages frequently end up on one of Tumblr’s scads of image blogs. Smith welcomes the attention. “Anything that hypes up the mag is awesome,” he said. “I remember a guy stole one of our Hall of Meats from our sites, put it up on his YouTube page, and then that clip ended up on Jay Leno. [That’s] the magic of the Internet — go viral or go home.”
Jeannie Hornung of Google Books said the process by which magazines get onto the search-engine behemoth’s archive is “pretty simple, actually: Our magazine partners give us permission and access to their print copies and we digitize them and make them searchable online.”
Google Books has an open form for publishers, authors and rights holders of periodicals to get in touch if they want to put their back issues on the site. That’s how Jeanie Croasmun, managing editor of Ancestry, said her title approached Google: “They asked us to send print versions of our magazine, which we did. A few months later, all issues forwarded to Google Books were available online — very painless, simple process.”
“We’re always talking to publishers about ways to help provide technology and tools that will increase the amount and quality of content online,” Hornung said. “Because we treat our partnerships with magazines as long-term business relationships, we have generally positive, strategic interactions. These are very early days for digital models to emerge on the magazine side, so we’re all about open-ended experimentation with magazine publishers.”
Google doesn’t disclose the archives’ traffic numbers or demographics. Nevertheless, Hornung said, “Titles with a cult following like Spy magazine do find a second life within the archive.” She also said it is popular with students: “We have noticed traffic patterns that align with school semesters. Because the profiles of magazines we’ve digitized are different from what is normally available to students, we do get a considerable amount of use from them. We link back to library catalogs and even authenticate library patrons through to the authorized resource from within university networks.”
Indeed, as the Internet continues to slowly consolidate, even a “lone wolf” operation like McCloskey’s Smash Hits archive has been snapped up. A few weeks ago, an employee of The Internet Archive asked if the organization could share his scans, and McCloskey inquired of a librarian co-worker whether the site was above-board. “She wrote back: ‘It is legit — and it’s fantastic!’ It’s very exciting, but I feel bad I did not do a better job of some of the scanning. I would like to think that maybe some of those old musicians might occasionally do a Web search and find the review of their 45 from 30 years ago.”
