Don’t Just Read the Great Books. Read Schlocky Ephemera, Too

In praise of disposable culture

I like the Great Books. I’m not saying that to virtue signal that I’m a very smart, sophisticated gentleman who reads big, difficult tomes.

I actually like reading and engaging with the classics of the Western canon. I’ve written about my love of the Great Books on AoM and talked about the Great Books on the podcast. A few years ago, I belonged to a men’s reading group where we read the Great Books. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read the Odyssey, Nicomachean Ethics, the Republic, or Meditations. Besides those ancient classics, I’ve also read and re-read my share of modern masterpieces like Invisible Man, Moby-Dick, and Notes from the Underground.

As I said, I love the Great Books.

But I also like to read history’s trashier schlock. Ephemera is the official name for it. This includes things like old magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, and pulp paperbacks. It’s the stuff that regular people read on regular days, as they went about their regular lives, and then discarded when they were done with it.

I love reading this stuff.

I have a stack of old men’s magazines from the middle of the century in my home office. They’ve got titles like True, Pic, and Gentry. Unlike Esquire or GQ, these publications didn’t survive the Cambrian explosion of men’s magazines that happened in the 20th century.

I enjoy thumbing through these vintage publications. I love the faint sour smell of wood pulp. I love reading the letters to the editor and the ads to see what anxieties and concerns men had back in the mid-20th century. As I’m thumbing through an issue of True, I like to remind myself that some guy in 1947 may have bought this particular magazine at some drugstore that had a soda fountain, read it while lying in bed next to his wife in his Levittown suburban home, and probably got nothing out of it except an hour or two of mindless entertainment. Now it’s in my office in Tulsa, OK, eighty years later, and I’m still enjoying it. That’s pretty wild.

When I’m in the stacks of a library, I spend a lot of my time looking through ephemera. University libraries usually have enormous, heavy-bound volumes that contain an entire year of magazines stitched together. Flipping through these volumes has sometimes inspired articles. For example, I once stumbled upon a bound volume of the National Police Gazette, which kickstarted a research project on one of America’s earliest men’s magazines — and led to an AoM piece about its history and influence.

Even if you’re not writing articles for the internet, I think you’d stand to benefit from reading old, disposable media. Below, I share five reasons I love reading ephemera and why you too might consider spending some time thumbing through it, as well as how to get started with becoming a schlock connoisseur.