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Old Outdoor Magazines Reveal Our Fishing-Hunting Heritage

It's difficult to know where we are going unless we know where we have been, and looking through old outdoor magazines is a pleasant way to spend free time. If you are like me, and are a hopeless romantic when it comes to all things related to fishing, hunting and reading about these pastimes, perhaps this is a good time and a wonderful way to gain a greater understanding of our outdoor heritage. Many years ago I acquired the fabulous magazine collection of the late Ben East of Holly, Michigan. He was the long-time field editor for Outdoor Life magazine where he worked his red-pencil magic on articles written by other writers. East worked for the magazine for 41 years, and also wrote hundreds of magazine articles for other magazines before beginning his Outdoor Life career. We shared several years of our lives when I was writing full-time and 95 percent of my work went to Outdoor Life, and he was an excellent mentor. His magazines and extensive files spanning his 60-year writing career came to me following his death.

Careful storage of Ben East's valuable magazine collection

I have carefully stored those old outdoor magazines (as many as 1,000 of them) and other historical files, in a temperature and humidity controlled atmosphere for nearly 20 years. Now, after reading and studying them, it's come time to part with about 300 magazines from various publications. Storage space has become very limited, and this calls for a drastic but necessary decision to let some magazines go. Why collect old outdoor magazines? Frankly, the front cover illustrations on older magazines were graced by full-color drawings by leading wildlife artists of the day, and they have become collectible. These color cover drawings had the power to inspire a reader, to make them dream of a fishing or hunting trip that would be the capstone event of their sporting lives. These drawings evoke a sense of the wilderness and of wild places and things. The artists could capture some of what today''s photo-illustrated covers cannot. I get goose bumps looking at those old covers, and as a kid of 12 years, my twin brother George and I had our own subscriptions to Field & Stream, Outdoor Life and Sports Afield, the Big 3 outdoor magazines of an earlier era. We greeted each magazine arrival with great anticipation, and read the articles from beginning to end, cover to cover.

Learning about our outdoor heritage

We immersed ourselves in the outdoor literature at a time when outdoor writing only meant writing about fishing, conservation issues and hunting. They were my link to the past, to another era when the outdoors only meant the consumptive sports of fishing and hunting. These were not spectator sports, but were participant sports where what you caught or killed was eaten. What these magazine covers did, and something current outdoor magazines can't do, is show human emotions. The drawings could be funny, gritty, raw or tug at your heart strings. One could see dejection, happiness, sadness, or it may portray a funny scene. Each cover had an emotional element that was readily apparent when seen, and the covers depicted things that readers could relate to. Those stories, and particularly the color covers and inside b/w and color art, were the stuff of excitement. The writers wrote Me and Joe stories where people went fishing and hunting, and the reader was welcome to come along for the literary ride. We shared vicariously in the writers' defeats and successes, and felt as if we were right at their elbow as they made the final stalk on a big ram or caught a heavyweight bass. We traveled to far-off countries, hunted lions and tigers with Jack O'Connor and other firearm writers, and came away with wild and vivid experiences. Those stories carried us off to one adventure after another.

Meet some of the legendary magazine writers

Those were not the days of the how-to story. Instead, those writers knew how to capture the imagination and the thrill of an outdoor experience and weave it into a great read. Many of those writers were legends in their own time. Men such as:

and many others held our minds in their hands as we read along and enjoyed every moment of every story.

Meet and treasure the outdoor illustrations of these legendary artists

However, as great as these writers were, it was the artists who drew the color cover illustrations that took our mind away from other things and captivated us with the artistic mastery of their drawings. There were artists named

and many others.

Here's the deal

A total of 301 of these magazines will be offered for sale but there are far too many to list here. If you are interested in some great old outdoor magazines from Ben East's personal collections, send a personal check for $5 with the word magazines in the subject line, and I'll send the complete list which notes the magazine name, date of publication, a listing of some of the authors in that issue, and notes on the artist and topic of that particular cover. Your $5 fee will be refunded from the cost of the first purchase. Orders of $50 or more will be shipped free. I can send scans of the covers but please limit your choices to three per order

.

Various magazines being offered

Magazines include

• Boy's Chum
• Field & Stream
• Fishing Facts
• Fishing & Hunting Guide
• Forest & Stream
• Fur-Fish-Game
• Great Lakes Fisherman
• Hunting & Fishing
• Hunter Trader Trapper
• Michigan Sportsman
• National Geograpic (only one)
• National Sportsman
• Outdoor Life
• Outdoors
• Outers Recreation
• Outdoor Recreation
• Outdoorsman
• Sports Afield
• The Michigan Sportsman
• The Northern Sportsman
• The Sportsman

Most magazines are one of a kind and all are scarce while some are rare. Sales will be made on a first-come basis.

Categories of outdoor magazine covers

This listing is broken down into broad categories including

• Atlantic Salmon Fishing
• Bass Fishing
• Bears
• Brook Trout
• Comic or Mood Scenes
• Deer & Deer Hunting
• Duck & Goose Hunting
• Exotic Wild Game
• Game Bird Hunting
• Hunting Dogs
• Lake Fishing
• Misc. Outdoor Action
• Muskellunge
• River Fishing
• Saltwater Fishing
• Various Wildlife
• World War II Related

How to pay

1) Make checks payable to

2) Enclose

• your complete address (home)
• e-mail address
• magazine name
• publication date
• price

These magazines will make a novel and much appreciated birthday or Christmas gift. Although I don't recommend it, magazine covers do look wonderful when framed under glass, and hung on a cabin, den or recreation room wall wherever sportsmen gather. Each order will be accompanied by a letter from me certifying that these magazines originated from the outdoor magazine collection of Ben East. E-mail me at www:daverichey.com to determine availability before ordering. Please note that there is a wide variation in prices, which is determined by the artist's stature as a magazine illustrator, content, scarcity, presence of inside art, and topic of the cover art. These magazines date back to the 1920s through the 1950s, and only a very few are newer. Here is a rare opportunity to own something that once belonged to the legendary Ben East, the Dean of Michigan outdoor writers. All lists will be sent by e-mail. I'll look forward to hearing from you.

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Tag Cloud Computing? - Categories, Keywords, SEO, Tags, Getting to Simplicity

The tag cloud is dead.

Cloud computing is merely a new marketing term for web services and support.

How can we simplify our web experience so that what we are paying attention to is what is important in our lives. And how do we filter out the tags (blow away the dark clouds and fog) are obscuring our goals. What exactly should we be paying attention to? It is a question we need to ask ourselves much more often these days. Or we find ourselves looking back on the day and into the night with a lot of work still to get done before we can sleep.

So one of my objectives for 2009 is to Simplify my Tag Cloud. I mean this both physically, mentally and spiritually. Because where the brain and mind are foggy so is our self, so is our core person. And by eliminating the noisy distractions of tweets, tags, feeds and emails, tv shows and advertisements for the better life, news and propaganda about global wars and warming, the better we are at eliminating the clutter of our online data stream, the more effective we will be an accomplishing our tasks and goals.

And in the long run, accomplishing more of your goals is a big deal.

So let me share my uber-tags first. These are not often written down, but in a drawing I did the other day, trying to explain what I am doing to simplify my priorities, I came up with a pretty good short list; TOP TAGS if you will.

1. work
2. family
3. play/creativity
4. health/exercise
5. spiritual practice

Now let me compare that with my current "category nav" from this website.

I think I have them all pretty well slotted with my TOP TAGS. I might need to add a "husband" category of some sort, or a better title than "ho-dad parenting" to cover the entire "family" spectrum. But I pretty much leave my personal work, relationship work, out of my writing. On the blog any way. ;-) And I might add tennis as it is my main "fun" and "exercise" activity. But it is actually caught in my "about" and "contact" pages. So I need to add my top-of-the-page nav as well.

And so with these added in as cross-tag meta categories I do cover all of my TOP TAGS. But now, for comparison, let me show you some of the tag cloud structures that I have elsewhere.

And here is the larger list from delicious. The bolder tags have more pages associated with them.

And one more from delicious that I really like. On this one, you get to see my entire 560 tags (as of 3-25-09) in order of priority. And as the number of links decreases the type is not only smaller but lighter in color as well.

And of course I could not fit all 560 tags onto a single screen shot, but you get the idea. And the image links to my delicious pages so you can go see for yourself, if you are interested. Okay, so here is a cloud of my Twitter tags.

Oh boy, I need to get something to talk about besides ME! Gosh!

And last example, a random cloud from a blog I frequent.

[Okay, so now I need a big wrap.]

Clouds are dead except for specific uses. But most clouds just do not work in the business space. Because someone would need to go back and clean up the tags on a regular basis. Cause what I call "web 2.0" you call "web2" and the next guy calls "social media." And most sites, business and friendship, do not do any tag cleanup.

In our personal lives tag clean up, and refocus on the BIG TAGS is essential.

Here is something David Foster Wallace said about his writing. "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," he once said, "of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it."

And that is our task, dear reader, to filter down the noise from our lives and pay attention to the TOP TAGS. Or as Covey put it in his matrix, the Not-Urgent but Important quadrant.

@jmacofearth
permalink on uber.la: http://bit.ly/big-tags

See Also: Rolling Stone's bio of David Foster Wallace

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Tags in posterous

You might have noticed the recent new feature on posterous which gives you the option of adding 'Tags' to your blog posts.

Tags serve a variety of purposes. I thought of listing down a few that come to my mind:

1. Helps your visitors to check posts of particular interest thus serving as 'categories'

2. Helps you in gaining a few more clicks by having better chances of turning up on search results since tags have their own url. So, be sure to tag your posts with relevant keywords. They really do help in getting search engine traffic. Although currently we cannot analyze these things, I'm pretty sure the folks at posterous would provide some way of traffic analysis to us (may be by way of a tie up with google analytics, sounds interesting?)

3. If you blog on more than one niche, you can use tags to post links related to a particular niche on other similar blogs, forums etc.

So go ahead, put up some relevant tags to all your posts, old and new. You can add tags to the posts that you email by writing the tags in the 'subject:' as ((tag: nischal, posterous)). So if the title of your post is 'Tags in posterous' and you need to add two tags to the post named 'categories' and 'Make your posterous better', then your subject line would look like:

Subject: Tags in posterous ((tag: categories, Make your posterous better))

If you know of anymore uses of 'Tags' then feel free to list them in the comments.

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