Print gun magazines used to be the standard way to stay tuned to the new scholarship in the world of collectible firearms. Then we got the internet. Today, researchers paid to write articles for print magazines have been effectively supplanted by collectors posting equally detailed and well-researched pieces on free public forums. While this is obviously sub-optimal for the people who relied on printing magazines and selling writing services, it has made information more available and (most importantly) far more discoverable for the general public.
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I prefer print magazines just because of the form factor. There’s some well researched info on the web , and then there’s a metric ton of garbage. There is no such thing as an editor in the online media.
YOUR info is good but a ton of it isn’t.
I agree about the lack of editorial supervision
Over the years, I have collected a number of firearms that I was interested in. Not dozens of the same gun, a variety of guns. Some are muzzleloaders, others WW l, WW ll a variety of civilian rifles and hand guns. I had to rely on luck to find articles on the latest acquisition in magazines. I found that I could get a book on many specific firearms rthrough the State library and finally started buying some. I collected many magazines, but had no way of finding an article when my intrest was peeked again. Today, all I have to do is type information into my ipad and several items appear. This is much easier for me.
Thanks forthe interesting article. You always do agreat job.
I don’t think you remember the amount of sheer dreck that used to get published in magazines. Yes, the editorial process weeded out a lot of “bad information”, but at the same time, the necessity of publishing something on time, every month…? That led to a lot of people cooperating to publish outright lies, misinformation, sensationalism, and slander.
The quality of information is unrelated to the means of dissemination. The potential is always there, for fraud and BS; when people were getting paid for it, they had an incentive to do it. Now? Not so much…
I don’t know that it’s better or worse, but it is different. We’ve gone through this before, with the advent of the written word taking over from oral traditions, and again when printing came in. There’s usually an explosion of sheer crap that comes along with every technological change, and you just have to cope with it. It’s not better or worse, it’s just… Different.
If print ever found a new gun that they didnt absolutely LOVE, they just might have a shred of integrity.
They are nothing but paid advertisements.
I recall some publication almost got in legal trouble for a negative review of the Taurus Turd. Other reviews tried to soft-peddle light primer strikes as ‘one of them things’ problem
For about 30 years, I was a subscriber to “Shotgun News”. Three times a month I got a cheap newsprint copy, chock full of ads, sources, and just a couple of articles. Want something obscure? It was buried in there somewhere. Then it morphed into “Firearms News”. More glossy fluff, fewer ads. Then they finally downsized to a regular gun magazine format, mostly showing off new stuff. Almost no classified ads. I finally stopped subscribing. They used to have the market cornered, and I suspect they will disappear shortly. If they went back to the old “Shotgun News” format, I would subscribe in a heartbeat.
I cannot deny the accessibility and usefulness of the internet, given that FW and Mr. McCollum are obviously a valuable, enjoyable and much appreciated fountain of information. I probably have a hundred YouTube channels in my subscriptions. But as a child of the 50s I can’t help but feel that the magazine on the nightstand gave me a material connection to Zern, O’Connor and Keith that this digital device presently in my hand doesn’t provide. I concede that it was a time and a place that is not there anymore, and that we truly can’t go home again. My grandchildren do not have connections to printed material, only to the pixel dust on the screens of their devices. And I suppose that’s what bothers my generation, as our trust in technology is tempered by our past, one that included kerosene lanterns on the mantle, and the experiences of using them. It saddens us that soon no one will be left who remembers the thrill of pulling Field & Stream and Guns & Ammo out of the mailbox. But the realities of economics continue to march forward, with no concern for the nostalgia of old men.
Agreed. I remember going into the drug store, and pulling copies of “Shooting Times” and “Guns and Ammo” down, barely affordable on my paper route money. “American Rifleman” was a treasure, and old copies bear no resemblance to what they put out today. More technical articles back then, too.
Print or printed ?
The major problems with print magazines are;
1. Subscription or OTC cost. I’ve seen glossy-format magazines go from an average $1.50 cover to average $10 cover per monthly issue. It isn’t just gun magazines; any glossy-paper magazine format (A4 size) costs more to print, bind and transport. When Finescale Modeler went to $6.99/issue (bimonthly) I stopped buying it. Today it’s $9.99 cover.
2. Storage. Where the Hell do you put them? I have a few boxes full, and I don’t mean Amazon-sized boxes. My former comic-book collection ran to 40 boxes, 7 5/8″ x 10 7/8″ x 27 1/2″ rated at 350 comics each. Yes, they took up a whole room. Today, CBR “copies” take up roughly 90 GB of a 2 TB EHD on my PC. One about the size of a flip-phone. Given a laptop to plug it into, I can “read” just about anywhere.
3. Government. The elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about. Governments do not like guns in non-government hands (other than “auxiliaries”, i.e. mobs they can count on to only attack people the government doesn’t like), so they really don’t like “gun people” (or “gun fanatics” as they like to label them) talking to each other.
Magazines used to be the primary means of communication, not only about the “nuts and bolts”, but also about legislation. Legislation the government often preferred nobody know about until it was too late.
European-style internet censorship (the Digital Services Act) can restrict “incendiary speech” online only so long as ISPs agree to abide by the restrictions. The fact that Elon Musk refuses to do so is why the EU has their daggers out for him now, specifically Thierry Breton and Clare Melford.
Print material can be restricted simply by government barring printers from printing it, retailers from selling it, or their own mail services from delivering it. (Yes, the parallels to the entire debate over “adult” materials is obvious.)
Jan Stevenson’s Handgunner magazine in UK was put out of business by constant government harassment, bankrupted by repeated legal attacks.
In a more specific example, when Theresa May was Home Secretary, she had police going to antique bookshops and confiscating any and all “gun-related” material. One London bookseller found himself being told to hand over a first edition of Modern Breechloaders (1870) by William Greener on the grounds of “You don’t want something like that in your store, do you?“- said message delivered by an AP uniform.
If you want to know just how easily print materials can be eliminated, read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. (Or just watch the 1966 Francois Truffaut movie version.)
The internet isn’t perfect in the “free speech” department, but it’s a lot harder to “erase” non-government-approved subjects online than it is to confiscate print runs and lock up the printer “In Real Life”.
I know we’re not supposed to talk about p01i7!kz here, but that’s ultimately what this subject is all about.
clear ther
eon
someone else to add to the list of harassed British gun Magazine editors;
the late Colin Greenwood,
the publisher of Guns Review was bought by Michael Hesseltine’s publishing company so that Greenwood could be de platformed in the run up to the 97 election
which hesseltine’s repulsive party lost.
we also have a newer problem – radical leftism in the libraries
the libraries are being ideologically “de colonised” of dead whit men’s work
I shit ye not, that the leading light in the movement in Britain, offers the policies of the Kim dynasty in North Korea as his model
it really is that bad
Overall, the main thing here is that we’re in the midst of another technological revolutionary era, in terms of information storage and dissemination. The first was probably oral tradition being overcome by the written word, the second was printing taking the place of copyists, and so forth.
We simply haven’t adapted to everything that the modern information technologies have brought in with them, and it’s readily apparent that a lot of us are mired in the past. I don’t miss the old days of magazines and all that very much, because what’s now available in my own home is basically hot and cold running crack for the infovore, which I fear I probably am.
I don’t think Ian ever encountered any of the various periodical index services that used to be out there, but there were resources that published indexes of what there had been published in the previous years. Many of them were highly esoteric, but they did exist; our library service in the military usually had subscriptions going to them, and you could go and look at them for research. Granted, it was all manual, and it was spotty, but… They did exist.
Today’s search engines are a politicized joke, and the software isn’t much better.
What we very badly need is a personal information index/reference piece that you can use to augment your own memory. A personal wikipedia, that you can add to and edit over the course of your life, as you find things that interest you or were professionally significant.
I have probably forgotten more than I know, which scares the hell out of me. I was going through some training materials I produced back in the 1990s, the other day (just ran across them, misplaced in a moving box), and I was horrified to realize that I’d quite literally forgotten things I used to know. Which is simultaneously frightening and disturbing, like realizing that you’re developing Alzheimer’s.
You don’t use information, you lose it. Unless you’ve got some sort of literal aide memoire going, which I think is a glaring deficiency in the software market.
Lotus used to publish a software package called Magellan, which sort of did what I’m thinking of, but nobody really addresses this space in any effective way. I suspect that there’s a literal ton of stuff out there that we already know but have actually either never connected or have totally forgotten.
It’s all information, baby. And, it’s all so very terribly, horribly fragile.
I’ve mentioned the gentleman I met at a gun show, who’d gathered up all that German machinegun stuff. I mean, he literally had an entire study filled with file cabinets and shelf after shelf of the material he gathered, and was working on the definitive guide to German machinegunnery. I wish I’d somehow gotten ahold of all that, certainly more than I did, but as he seemed to be in good health and on his way to publishing something, I just left with what I thought pertinent, expecting to see something in print eventually. Little did I know he’d die (apparently…) while I was overseas on a Korean tour, and I’d never see any of that massive trove published. I am sort of horrified to consider that it’s likely in a landfill somewhere in Northern Illinois, tossed into a literal garbage heap by his heirs that had no idea at all what they were discarding.
Stuff like that is something that we all need to think carefully about, and try to do our best to prevent from happening. All that knowledge he’d scavenged up from post-WWII Germany is gone, unavailable to us today, and every bit of it signifies some lives lost, some lives gained, and was paid for with blood, one way or another. It seems profoundly disrespectful, to me, to let that happen. All the lives taken by the Nazi war machine, and we’ve nothing to show for it, no lessons really learned, just rumor-mill BS propaganda. And, from what I’ve seen of modern MG practice, that information, tainted though it may be by contact with the Nazis, could have saved lives in Afghanistan…
Preservation of knowledge is a holy calling, in my mind. Magazines were one way we did it, and now the internet has revamped and enabled more capability while also taking some away. Adapt; improve; preserve.
One of my “bad habits” is that when I discover some website devoted to things like hard-boiled detective novels or etc, the first thing I look for is their FAQ. It almost invariably includes a list (or more than one) of the novels in a given series.
I copy and paste it and create a permanent ODT document. It goes in the file of that series on my EHD right along with any PDFs or EPubs of said novels or etc.
So I have an index of those books.
Mostly it’s handy. Sometimes it’s vitally necessary. Go ahead- try to work out a filing system for David Weber’s “Honorverse” books without something like that. Just. Try.
Some things you can get such an index of on Wikipedia. Anything to do with “controversial” subjects the Wikicrew disapprove of, there won’t be one.
Maybe the fact that I was a library/AV assistant in HS has something to do with my methods. I know how to create a “card index” without really having to think about it, even half-a-century later.
I believe it’s a skill everybody should cultivate, especially for dealing with online resources. Create you own “library card” system; don’t trust somebody else to do it.
But that’s just me.
clear ether
eon
@eon,
What would you consider a good reference for old-school card catalog creation?
Is there such a thing?
I’m looking at some journaling apps, right now, and none of them seem to really fit the bill for what I’m thinking of, being devoted to narcissistic navel-gazers who want to record the cloud cover where they’re at every day.
What I want is an electronic version of what the Royal Navy used to demand of its midshipmen, a journal/log of their time and work, plus whatever they found useful.
It’s interesting to go back through the stuff I used to carry around as an NCO; I have a “cheatsheet” version of the old Demolition Card that has a whole bunch of additive information either written in or taped to it in the form of additional little printout cards. That Demo Card got me through innumerable exercises, and having things handy like the various decimal conversions of fractions, and all the rest saved my exhausted ass on several occasions.
I think every profession likely has these things, these crib sheets, and what I find simultaneously amazing and disturbing is how little they’re studied. The folks at the Army Research Laboratories did a bunch of work back during the late 1980s on something they called the “Combat Leaders Guide”, which was a compendium of such wisdom, but it never really went anywhere due to the various branches not wanting to assume responsibility for its upkeep or production.
Stuff like that is the ephemera of modern life, and I’d like to know why it gets so little attention. What’s frustrating is that there is so much unexploited potential in these so-called “smart phones” we all carry around… I’d love to have something like the Sequoia Publishing “Pocket Ref” as an app that I could use to add pertinent notes to about things I run into, and all the rest of the other vital information.
I’m also frustrated by the way you have such crappy tools like automotive manuals. I mean, every damn major job I do on one of my Toyotas, there’s always some undocumented BS that I run into, but there’s no quick and easy way of annotating the stuff into either the .pdf files or the hard copy as you go. So, every time you have to go back and repeat that task, it’s a trip down “Flawed Memory Lane”, trying to reconstruct all the little work-arounds you did the last time you did that task…
You pretty much have to create such things yourself. The old Dewey Decimal system for libraries is a good start;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification
It’s actually a lot simpler than it looks;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes
For instance, you’ll find most works on weapons in the 620s, although some are down in the 300s. History, including military history, is in the 900s.
Books on UFOs may be in the 610s along with aircraft- or down in the 000s with Philosophy and Religion.
Fiction is filed alphabetically by the first two letters of the author’s last name. A “J” in front indicates it is a “Juvenile”, i.e. for K-12. I’ve seen this screw up a lot of people, who go to a library looking for a book by Anne Rice, not knowing they should type in “Rice, Anne”. Dewey’s fiction system is pretty intuitive, but computer search engines aren’t always as smart.
(Especially if the library tried to get away with buying a cheap one or downloading a freebie shareware item. A few of the latter are excellent, Excel’s to name only one. Most of them, Like MS’s, are OK at best. A few, like Malwarebyte’s SafeSearch Library, truly suck.)
Maybe it’s because I’ve been using it since I got my first public library card at age 6, and our school system libraries up through HS used it, but I can pretty much “navigate” a Dewey-indexed library without even necessarily using their search engines except to just verify whether or not they have the book I’m looking for. If they do, I still pretty much automatically know where it should be.
If at all possible, avoid using the Library of Congress system. It’s really only useful for looking up issues of the Congressional Record. (My college used it. Half a century later, the noisome memory still lingers.)
There are software packages for creating Dewey card indexes using spreadsheets. They’re probably the most convenient way to create an index for computer storage, online or offline.
As for me, all my storage is offline. Because I’m just that suspicious kind of person.
😉
cheers
eon
“(…)no quick and easy way of annotating the stuff into either the .pdf files (…)”
You need proper tool for that, for example https://www.goodnovel.com/qa/annotate-pdfs-using-foxit-reader-download
Ian McCollum not worried about it much but I am in my 60s am very seasoned on firearms but your history on firearms is truly outstanding ! Thank you very much !!!!!!
I hope print never dies. One fateful day around 15 years ago a co-worker gave me a ratty tattered copy of Gun Digest 1986 40th Annual that included great pieces on the Gustloff pistol, a brief but fascinating piece on a one-off Andrew Burgess made repeating-side-by-side-lever-operated shotgun/rifle and most memorable Early Pump Guns by John Malloy. This article covers the late Victorian black powder predecessors to today’s ubiquitous slide action shotguns. That’s how true gun collecting started for me.
In a sense a lot of us probably owe the furthering of our interests – in my case the birth of collecting and doing my own research – to the ol’ gun rag. It is likely video presentations (youtube etc.) have ruined subscription numbers to the detriment of the authors. Perhaps current writers seek out to post videos for free with the option of say Patreon..? All I know is I still hunt down and buy old magazine articles and adverts for the knowledge they contain. Not sure what the future holds for gun magazines but a huge tip of the hat and enduring respect to anyone who produces good quality work – in print or otherwise.
Lastly, a Forgotten Weapons periodical would be cool. Fill it with interesting pieces, photography, flair – if you ever do I’d love to contribute!
I grew up with print magazines and I do miss them. Still, with the internet there is a lot more information readily available but as someone else mentioned, it is not curated (i.e., anybody can write anything). Some more serious magazines would include an index at year’s end of that year’s articles for reference sake. One thing about print (or online) magazines-versus-today’s online content creators (like Ian) is that the market has fragmented. So a magazine would host a number of articles, so that buying one magazine gave you access to multiple experts. Today, however, each content creator is on their own (on Patreon, or Substack) and you have to pay to get access to each individual expert. I know Ian and others tried to create an aggregate platform for multiple YouTubers recently that didn’t work out, so maybe that model is just dead — but there are so many great content creators out there and I can’t afford to support them all.
Mr. McCollum yours is the only YouTube that I know of that discusses the “Off The Main Highway” of firearms history; specifically military firearms. Now I’ve see other YouTube channels on other subjects: movie reviews (Dark Corners Bad movie reviews-highly recommended), Entertainment, JRR Tolkien etc. A lot of them are opinionated waste of time with a small portion worth the time. There are some channels that are entertaining but not all that informative. (C&Rsenal, InRange TV, duelist1954). I am so lucky to have discovered your channel. Thank you.
I will second that. Watch a couple of installment of ‘Kentucky Ballistics.’ Discover how a .50 BMG round will indeed destroy a gallon tub of sour cream. A punt gun shoot through the doors of a junked armor car. I can’t drink enough vodka to convince myself that is either informative or entertaining
So, we have a conundrum in the argument of print vs. internet; Yes, printed material has a price tag. Yes, printed material, once read, sits on your table, desk, bathroom sink, wherever until either boxed up or thrown away.
However…printed material in a box, kept in your possession, is yours until you get rid of it. If living in a place like jolly old, you have books or magazines about firearms that you can reference, and you keep that to yourself, then it’s not a tag on your activities the same way that the internet will be. You can keep confidence in a VPN only so long as you can be assured that any government entity doesn’t go to the owner of said VPN company, and force access/control over the system. That happens, and you can find yourself being waken up at 2 a.m. to your dog or loved ones getting shot by a raiding “agency”.
Accuracy of printed material is an issue if you are not very discretionary of who you read; the better publications are very careful of their editing, and do not wish to print info that would lead to a loss in subscribers. Mainstream publishers tend to be careful of their writers. Conversely, the proliferation of AI written articles has started to show that we have a very serious issue with the accuracy of internet articles, which will really have an impact on discussions of different subjects, and firearms, shooting sports, and the history thereof will be no exception. I would contend that you hold on to your printed materials, because those may be needed for a sort of educational “reset” when the young generation starts seeking knowledge, and most of that seeking will take place on the internet.
Ah, you lovely hypocrite! You make $$ selling printed publications and providing web content. Let’s just leave it at that.
Printed material in one’s hands that can be laid aside and then reopened at your leisure without the assistance of some charged electronic devise is invaluable.
Searching the internet for firearms information ASSUMES you know something about what your are looking for. But what if you are don’t have a particular firearm in mind, or a firearms related subject you have NEVER been exposed to, which suddenly captures your curiosity?
As the alternative, let’s say you are a subscriber to GUNS Magazine (I’m a bit prejudiced, having been their contributing editor for monthly articles on surplus arms, shotgunning and rimfire subjects for decades with additional editorial contributions at Gun Digest, Guns and Ammo, the American Rifleman, etc.) Let’s just say I have been broadly published and now soundly do not accept your thesis that the Internet is a superior product rather than being a supplemental product to a diversity of articles contained in printed magazines.)
My MAIN point is that a monthly printed GUNS magazine shared with its reader a VARIETY of articles on a variety of subjects, none of which you were exposed to before, and as a result you reached out via the internet to gather further information.
Get my point? The printed magazine with diverse subject matter STIMULATED your curiosity about a particular subject, from a particular historical firearm to a handloading or hunting application, etc. etc. Plus you could lay the printed copy down, pick it up again and read through another article on a new subject you never would have searched for on the web because you weren’t familiar with it.
No, the demise of printed general, gun magazines (now including the American Rifleman and GUNS–the 2nd oldest gun magazine-) will result on the general dumbing-down of the firearms community instead of opening up new horizons and interests in subjects the enthusiast would never be exposed to except in printed form from a general firearms magazine.
Being a last century fossil I did my research in the periodical index at the local library. Those old indexes need to be scanned into a searchable database and, copyright issues aside, the old magazine article also need to be scanned into a searchable index. Probably all printed books need to be scanned if an electronic index does not already exist.
Search engines also need to be improved, probably searches that are paid for to avoid paid insertions or politically motivated restrictions. You can best this will be or is being done to feed AI systems, copyrights be dammed. (I suggest you insert a unique misspelled and odd sentence in every publication to test if they have been scanned by searching for the sentence.)
I love databases, they are such a fantastic tool… except those maintained illegally by a certain outragious government entity.
A lot is being written lately about the ‘enshitification’ of the Internet. Written for good reason I might add. I recently had a search for Colt Patterson turn up with a photo of an S&W Model 19 as accompanying photo.
If a topic feeds discussion in a glossy magazine, you have to wait for a month for the letters to the editor. Not so online. For better or for worse, someone’s going to opine, and and about 55-60% of the time, they’re going to have a little extra bonus knowledge that you wouldn’t have gotten the benefit of from a print article. Of course, nobody leaves their iPhone 17 in the port-o-john for the next guy.
Going to bed with a magazine or book , magazine is safer than book to get sleep . After so much time on the computer , print is easy on he eyes .
Anything Ross Seyfried wrote is in my opinion a national treasure. I’d love to find the Guns & Ammo article he wrote concerning paper patching bullets…where he uses pages sourced from the magazine itself to make said patches!! (I’ve looked online and cannot find it.)
totally agree about Ross Seyfreid
I am not a firearms researcher. I like to read articles from gun magazines, perhaps dealing with both modern firearms and/or historic firearms. All the gun magazines I have previously subscribed are now gone. I am saddened by this lost pasttime.
Paper is better than text online, and both are orders of magnitude better than videos on the internet. I still have running subscriptions to Rifle (lot of generic hunting rifle reviews, but interesting historical pieces fairly regularly) and Recoil (yeah a bit tacticool and wander a bit too into the political side with the interviews, but still good material for the most part), and I don’t intend to cancel either any time soon.
I really can’t stress how much I despise everything turning into videos though, including this site. I can accept using them to show specific things in motion that don’t come across well in still photos, but for the love of god, post stuff in text form.
I miss the old American Rifleman and Shotgun News.
Sadly SGN drifted completely off target and lost all value.
Rifleman went and turned from an informative publication to just a sad copy of Guns and Blammo. Complete with glowing write ups of any gun, vehicle or pencil sharpener that happened to be paying for ad space. Throw in the “expert” who wouldn’t train the peasants without a written permission slip from local law enforcement at his country club special school and the BS tales of his adventures made me drop them and not look back.
The old Old Town Station/Armchair Gun show was much more informative than the current publications and he was actually honest in trying to sell his guns and in his writing.
I wrote to Firearms News/SGN to complain. Didn’t do any good. I wanted all the ads, and they wanted all the articles. I don’t think they will be around much longer.