Sad State of Periodicals

Magazines, Not Clips

For about 25 years, I bought most every gun and survival magazine I could find.  For the last 10 years or so, I haven't bought very many gun magazines, but I've tried all the survival magazines I could find.  I'll start off by saying that Self Reliance Illustrated and Survival Quarterly are both great, but they are big, glossy, high end mags, not the news stand monthlies that we used to have in SURVIVE and American Survival Guide. 

Several gun magazine publishers have put out "annuals" which are big, $9.99 or more magazines, chock full of intro type information.  Survivalist Magazine is not terrible, but they seem to have some trouble coming out on time, and I know several of their writers and staff have left recently. 

I just picked up a new one, Living Ready, put out by the same folks who bring Blade magazine and Gun Digest.  It looks like it is going to be a quarterly, but has potential to go where I think a survival magazine should be.  In this first issue, there are some good really good articles, but they also seem to have padded the pages by including book excerpts from established authors, including the late Jerry Ahern.  They also fall into the trap that nearly all of the gun magazines have done lately.  They look like they get their layout and design ideas from Maxim and Men's Health.  Giant photographs with a tenuous link to the article, and short, bullet point articles with lots of even shorter insert articles.  It's as if the publishers think that we have too short of an attention span to read a whole article and flip over to page 58 for the conclusion.

I'm going to give Living Ready a shot, and hope they live up to the legacy left by ASG and SURVIVE.  In the meantime, I'll be content with Backwoods Home Magazine, which is more in line with homesteading, but also has a survival and gun element, and Mother Earth News, which is mostly homesteading, if you can get past their radical left bent.

What magazines do you like and can recommend?