Note: This article is the first installment of a two-part series. — Paul
At some point around 1993 or ’94, through means I no longer recall, I acquired a list of trade magazines — publications devoted to the specifics of a particular business category or industry. This was before you could just punch up such a list of such publications on the internet, so I had fun poring over the magazine names, many of which seemed like deadpan jokes: American Funeral Director, National Hog Farmer, Parking Today, Hay & Forage Grower, Rock Products, Elevator World, Mushroom News, and the admirably simple Demolition.
As a fan of micro-niche categories, I was fascinated by the specificity of these publications’ coverage. Who knew that there’d be a magazine called Bulk Transporter, or that it would be distinct from another journal called Refrigerated Transporter? And while it wasn’t so surprising to learn that there was a trade journal for conference managers, I didn’t expect that there’d also be one expressly for religious conference managers (called, of course, Religious Conference Manager).
That list of trade mags included contact info for all of them, so I called a few dozen of the most interesting-sounding ones and requested sample copies, which most of them were happy to provide. Sometime within the next year or two I used those sample copies as the basis for an article (I think it was for Utne Reader) about the endearingly weird world of trade magazines. Later on, in 2008, I created a presentation about trade mags for the short-lived PowerPoint “band” that I was in, called the Forewords. (Our claim to fame is that we opened a few shows for the Magnetic Fields, whose fans didn’t seem to understand why the opening act was enthusiastically extolling the virtues of Frozen Food Digest, Industrial Hygiene News, and Cremationist of North America.)
All of which is to say that I’ve had a thing for trade magazines for a long time. I used to have a big collection of them — well over 100 different titles — but I’ve downsized a lot over the years and now have only about two dozen, most of which are shown in the photo at the top of this page.