Time Magazine: November 19th, 1928

I found the right periodicals section of the library after a few minutes of wandering around and a little help from Katy and Hannah, who were already there looking through magazines.  I chose a volume of Time magazine from 1928, with issues from July to December.  I flipped through the book to November, and found an issue actually published on my birthday, November 19^th.  It was interesting to think that I was reading something that was published on my birthday such a long time before I was born.

                The first thing I noticed about the magazine was the ads.  They were different from the ones we see today.  Almost all of the pictures in the ads were hand drawn instead of photographs, and the few ads that did have photographs had small ones.  The ads were also filled with text, nearly as much as most of the articles.  The text gave helpful information about the product in most cases, with feedback from customers that didn’t seem as made-up as most ads do today.  The advertising felt a lot more honest to me.  I enjoyed seeing some of the strange products that the magazine advertised, like the Dictaphone.  It was a huge machine that people placed on their desks to record messages, I think.  It even advertised that it was “up with the times” because it came in ten different colors.  There was also an ad for a company called College Humor, which probably has nothing to do with the popular website that exists today, but I found it funny anyway.

The magazine itself read more like a newspaper than an actual magazine.  There was no cover that went with it, just a front page with the title at the top.  The articles weren’t so much articles as they were small paragraphs that fit into certain categories.  They were split up like a newspaper is, into sections like Sports, National, and Entertainment.  There were several categories I found interesting like “aerospace” and “medicine.”  Overall, the text was written in a more formal style and on a more educated level than most modern magazines. 

I liked this assignment, because I think magazines and things that were intended for the general public can be helpful when trying to get an idea of what another time period was like.  Literature or art doesn’t always appeal to, or express the opinions of, the masses like magazines and newspapers do.  My parents have some old magazines from the 60s and 70s that I enjoy looking at, so it was interesting to see another even older magazine.