The magawiki is a collection of magazine contents including cover artists, stories, authors, illustrators, photographers, article subjects, even advertising, arranged magazine issue by issue, magazine title by title. Search the magawiki for your favorite writers, illustrators, movie stars, sports stars, music stars, etc.
The magawiki was basically born of practicality. I’ve sold a good number of magazines over the past several years, especially on eBay but also on other venues, and in order to enhance my listings I do my best to copy out each issue’s table of contents and then, time permitting, page through the entire issue taking other relevant notes (such as: who illustrated stories, who’s pictured in an article, what interesting advertisements are included). Eventually I sold enough magazines to realize that I was often composing listings which I had already created in the past. Then I realized that it’d be smart to save my listings of contents.
Sure enough this cut down my workload to some degree. I keep an Excel file for each of my commonly sold magazine titles and pretty quickly these files grew into something that seemed like it could be helpful to others. I had always admired and utilized a couple of other magazine contents sites, the Cornell University Library’s Making of America site for 19th century publications and The FictionMags Index for newer magazines (both found on our Checklists and Galleries page), but while both of these sites include a huge amount of information, neither are by any means complete. Nor is this site, there’s just too much information to be gathered, but as my own files grew I decided they were well worth posting online and thus the magawiki was born sometime in 2006.
But it’s not a wiki? Well, it used to be, but even then it was it wasn’t your typical wiki as I’d never managed to create enough pages to open it up for reader contributions. With some spare time just before I moved the magawiki here I realized that I’d be able to use WordPress to import my files much quicker than I had figured out how to through the old site architecture, MediaWiki. I signed up for hosting on a Sunday night, started uploading files later that same night and had everything, about 2,900 pages, uploaded by that Thursday afternoon (this occurred September 6-10, 2009).
I hope you enjoy the magawiki. It’s intended for research–if you collect a writer or are looking for articles about, say, Babe Ruth, you can do a search and wind up with a checklist. If you see a magazine listed on eBay but the seller doesn’t include any details of what’s inside then maybe you can find the same title on the magawiki and have an edge over other bidders. You can also use it for creating your own eBay listings–if you happen to have one of the issues that I have listed here feel free to cut and paste the content into your sales listing.
If you find the magawiki helps you in some way, any way, whether it’s listed above or not, then I’d love it if you took the time to say hi and let me know how you used it.
I hope you enjoy the new, improved and bigger magawiki!
Cliff Aliperti