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I started reading Analog magazine in 1967. At that time it came with a stiff cardstock cover wrapped in a heavy brown paper wrapper, If you had a subscription. It was the highlight of the month. Oh, did I mention it came 12 times a year? Well, first they lost the brown paper wrapper, which existed to protect the magazine as it transited the mail system. I wrote a letter of complaint, but of course it did no good. Then they got rid of the cardstock cover. There was nothing left to live for, and one year when one of John W. Campbell's successors published a few issues in a row with too many stories I didn't like, I dropped my subscription. Somewhere in there I subscribed to Isaac Asimov's, back in its early heyday, and it had cardstock covers then too.

Imagine my disappointment, now that my writing has reached a level at which I can sell poems to both of those magazines, that the covers are made out of paper so flimsy if curls back on itself if you even pick the magazine up. I like the fiction and poetry in both of those damn things these days, but I'm not going to subscribe to something with no staying power. And now you get only four issues a year.

Why am I thinking about this now? I am rereading some of those old magazines, and marveling at their durability. (Some of the content is pretty good too.) I think that the subscriber base must be a group of special people now anyway. If they increase the quality of the publication by going back to stiff covers and raising the price a little, would they lose very many subscribers? I don't know. But they're not getting me!