We’re now in the era during which I had begun to purchase these magazines from the stands myself, first through the happy discovery of used back issues at a stall at the Berlin Farmer’s Market (Berlin, NJ, still there) and then a bit later at a news and tobacco shop on the corner of Haddonfield-Berlin Road and Somerdale Road.
From that intersection, I could get just about anywhere I might want to go in my local travels. (Not too far from there was the “High Speed Line”, light rail into Philadelphia. And fairly close to that was the Echelon Mall, which housed a Walden Books. Down the other end of the Haddonfield-Berlin Road was, oddly enough, Haddonfield, NJ, which hosted one of the best used book stores I’ve ever been in, though its name escapes me now. Well, enough for old home week.)
1973 saw Ten titles and 69 individual issues.
Weird Tale’s resurrection would end with the issue following the one shown, and would be in hiatus for another seven years.
Amazing and Fantastic were doing relatively well; forthcoming excerpts from Ted White’s recently released The Fantastic Editorials and The Amazing Editorials from Dave Langford’s Ansible Press, may shed a bit more detail, depending upon which editorials he chooses to excerpt.
F&SF was firmly in its era of publishing tribute issues to various authors (they were always a treat), Analog was chugging along nicely, Ben Bova having had nearly a year to figure things out by this time.
Galaxy and If were still a solid presence (and publishing serializations of some very popular titles). Ultimate’s reprint titles were mainstays (and, again, a valuable asset for neo-fans like myself at the time, giving us access to fiction we might otherwise have had difficulty finding) and Vertex, which had debuted earlier in the year would not last to its 2nd anniversary, though it did manage to publish many high profile names.
The end of 1973 wasn’t a great year for magazines on the stands, but it wasn’t a bad one either. So far as I was concerned, not having any real knowledge of the field at the time, it was among the BEST of times, because every trip to the stalls, shops and stores led to new discoveries.
