Popular Radio
POPULAR RADIO was a magazine about setting up and listening to and enjoying radio broadcasts during the formative years of the 1920's. It aimed at a broader market than the technically oriented magazines published by Gernsback, but was more about the hardware than about the stars or the programs.
For most of its run its covers were stylized radio-related graphics, against a background of silver-colored ink. This kind of cover is impossible to reproduce correctly on a computer screen, but we've tried. We've tried several different ways. Give us some slack.
POPULAR RADIO ran from May, 1922, until May 1928. In late 1925 it absorbed THE WIRELESS AGE, another radio-related magazine which had been founded in 1913. In the last two issues it tried to cover the early, abortive beginnings of television, adding "AND TELEVISION" to its title. According to Steve Davis, the last issues used better paper and more expensive two-color layouts, and we assume production costs went up. Content was somewhere between consumer and technical experimenter, and may have been too technical for one and not technical enough for the other. Perhaps they guessed wrong when they focused it on television; the last issue announces television articles for the June issue that was never published. A subscription ad in the last (May) issue offers special deals for new subscribers, including 5 months for a dollar or 7 months for $1.25 -- and that may be a sign of a cash-flow problem.
If you like old radio, you will like the e-book reprint of
the 1922 Sears, Roebuck Electrical Goods and Radio Apparatus Catalog. Here's a writeup about it, with pictures. It's $2.99, free of DRM, and with all the pages rendered as images you can enlarge to see detail, and even print out. It's $2.99! Follow the link.
|
Date: 01/21/2008
Owner: Magazine Art Gallery Administrator
Size: 52 items
|
Original copyrights are the property of their creators or successors, where applicable;
image restoration and processing copyright MagazineArt.org.
Have covers we're missing, or better copies? Can you scan them or take digital photographs? Send us e-mail.
This website is sponsored by Hidden Knowledge, publishers of electronic books.
Visit the Hidden Knowledge websites:
| Hidden Knowledge
| Travel History
| Burton Holmes, Traveler
| Rafael Sabatini
| Trans-Siberian Rail
| Look at Pictures
|
| Blogs: Early Radio
| Mike's Rail
| Picture History
| Old High Tech
| Chromolithography