On his blog, Jon Lebkowsky recently wrote about one of his favorite childhood magazines, Fate.
I used to read "Fate Magazine" when I was a kid. I really dug the illustrations on the covers through the fifties, before they changed to a bland text cover with no images. I accidentally discovered a web site for "Fate." It has a bunch of the old covers where they're selling back issues, and they have posters and trading cards. It looks like they're still publishing, and they've gone back to the cool illustrated covers. The magazine itself is a collection of stories about ghosts, UFOs, and other paranormal phenomena and Forteana.
In the New York Times article about Robert and Aline Crumb that David posted to Boing Boing a couple of days ago, the writer mentioned that the Crumbs had a collection of old Fate magazines in their bookshelves. (The author, Allen Salkin emailed to tell me "R. Crumb has actually illustrated two covers for Fate in recent years. He's a real fan.")
I was introduced to Fate around 1970, when my mother bought a subscription from a door-to-door magazine salesman. We didn't have a lot of disposable income at the time, but my mother felt sorry for the guy selling subscriptions, so she bought the cheapest magazine on the list, which was Fate. The covers had become horrible by that time, but I was fascinated by the articles (and the ads for the Rosicrucians).
You can buy the back issues from Fate's website.
