© Norman Sperling, September 18, 2011
In the 1970s and 80s I was probably the biggest dealer in Sky & Telescope back issues, and bought and sold a good number of related magazines, too. I continue to sell quite a number of old and antiquarian books, but the only back-issue business I've paid attention to since I started running The Journal of Irreproducible Results in 2004 is, naturally, JIR.
In the last 2 years, half a dozen retiring astronomers, my age and older, have contacted me about selling large back runs of Sky & Telescope, and occasionally other magazines.
S&T now sells a CD package with 70 years' worth of their issues, including index. Scientific American also sells its contents that way. Of course there's nothing like the real thing. The feel of the real magazines is important. You can read a whole lot more pages, with a whole lot more enjoyment, on paper than on a screen. So the magazines have value.
Right now, friends and I have S&T sets for sale near:
* Cleveland (especially eager to sell)
* Boston
* St. Louis
* Chicago
* San Francisco.
(locations are important because shipping costs a lot.)
They'd be mighty heavy and bulky to sell on my Great Science Trek, but I could probably fit one set at a time into the trailer. Should I try to sell them online? At conventions? By wide eMailing? Which institutions are on-the-make these days?
Magazine runs I want to sell to good homes, preferably by summer 2012:
* The Journal of Irreproducible Results
* Scientific American
* Physics Today
* Mercury
* Astronomy
* Sky & Telescope
* The Sky
* The Telescope
* The Planetarian
* Isis
* Journal for the History of Astronomy
* Geoscientist
* Quarterly Journal of the RAS
* Observatory
* Griffith Observer
* Leaflets of the ASP
Contact me at normsperling [at] gmail.com
