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I just got my digital copy of a famous old car magazine. In it's paper form it weighs ten pounds and comes with a porno cover (plain brown wrapper, at least years ago).

It took possibly 15 minutes to digest any items of interest...and there certainly wasn't much meat on the bones.

As far as the many ads go, I have come to feel the internet is a far better source (unreliable though it is...) in part because it reaches a wider audience and is often more current.

Editorial matter consisted of picture spreads of a few car shows within driving distance of the offices, several opinion pages that are apparently the responsibility of otherwise unemployable relatives of the publisher and assorted fric and frac. Essentially provincial chatter, IMHO.

My question is this: Which publications (if any) interest you, and why?

I only kept 3 going out of the many. I stopped subscribing to the brown cover one many years ago for most of your reasons.

Collectible Automobile: IMHO, it has the best researched and written in depth articles. Great pictures and still mostly concentrates on the era cars I am interested in.

Classic Car: A spin off or evolution of a couple of other titles owned or acquired by the brown cover company. Decent car owner articles and some how to's and resto progress or what/how they did it articles.

Skinned Knuckles: A small relatively inexpensive magazine that has had some of the best how do you fix it or how do they work type articles of any magazine I can think of.

PAC and Studebaker's Turning Wheels don't really count but I keep them coming.

KFT (abbreviation for automobile technology), published monthly from 1951 - 1999, unchanged price: 1 Deutsche Mark, cheapest woodiness paper, blurred b&w photographs, always two or three pages filled with communist gibberish (wrapping paper for fish) but everything else was great. Plain facts and clear figures, detailed tables, curve charts, expert knowledge, full blown researched reviews, no names, no woman, annual tables of contents, practicality and factual appearance like a documentary film without fast pan shots. Puffery? Garishness? Hastiness? Opinions?
If a lifelong jailed car guy would suddenly released from prison before reading the KFT through to the end he probably would ask for postponement.

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Hemmings Classic Car.

Everything else I used to get either went out of business, or became rubbish.

I keep my PAC quarterly, my Pac Cormorant. I buy C. A. but only after I have perused through it at the book store to see if there are any articles of interest to me. After 20 years of buying Mopar Collectors Guide, I cancelled my subscription because they were not covering any cars except exotic hot rods, nothing in the way of stock machinery.

The only worthless car magazines I can think of were some of those R&T, C&D, which waxed poetic about the virtues of European cars which rusted out like crazy back in the 60's and 70's. Back when you couldn't buy a good car period.

In one of my moves my back issues of one mag going back to 1958 didn't make it. Damn if a car didn't come in that I used to have a picture of in unrestored condition. I tried to find someone with a copy who would help the owner but nobody would.

I had forgotten R&T, which was really good when the founder owned it because it had a distinct point of view. In went south in the sixties, ifd I recall right.

I thought the euro cars interesting because of the design and philosophy differences. Sure didn't want to try tracking down parts, particularly for English cars, which seemed to change essential vendors every month.

Magazines seem to have all become trade magazines, published for profit with no point of view and little depth. Trade magazines are the undisputed champions of profit first, content an afterthought.

I'm ranting again, It gets worse with age.

I just returned from a camping trip and took some old 1980's Cars&Parts to read. They were such a good publication back then with some really knowledgeable writers. This was the only monthly publication I ever bought until they stopped shipping them to Canada without a subscription. Other than the PAC publications I have no interest in modern magazines with mindless dribble for articles and countless ads.

Hi

Car & Parts in the '70's had articles by Hugo Pfau, Menno Duerksen, Richard Langworth, Jack Triplett writing well- researched, interesting articles. In the case of Pfau, he wrote his recollections of his experiences at LeBaron and knowledge of customcoachbuilding. His articles are worth pursuing if you're interested in the subject, they ran from '71 until his passing in '80.

The other big one is Special Interest Auto, 1970 through the early-mid 1990's, especially when Mike Lamm was still in charge. The early issues are just loaded with great research and writing! Later, it deteriorated badly.

Car Collector and Car Classics were savers, Collectible Automobile (pricy but worth it if it features a make of interest), some issues of the AACA The Antique Automobile dependent on the article subjects.

Old copies of Hemmings Motor News? Someone must have a bushel or two they'd be glad to give away!

Steve

I canceled my auto magazine subscriptions about two years ago. They were becoming less relevant to me as my interest in Packards was taking all my car time. The club publications (PAC, PI and CCCA) are the only ones I read these days. I was a member of the AACA, but I have let that membership drop. The have a good publication and the regional club is an active one, but I hardly attended any meetings or events. I may rejoin for the publication. I will look at Old Cars Weekly again.

(o{I}o)