Q. Why are the dates on magazines so out of whack with the calendar?
A. It’s true that if you had a Rip Van Winkle episode and found yourself waking up with no idea what the date was, the last place you’d want to go would be a magazine rack.
The major monthlies — such as Vanity Fair, GQ and Vogue — have had their February issues out on the stands for a while, but many titles are acting as if Valentine’s Day and Presidents’ Day are already in the rearview mirror. Armchair General, a military history magazine that boasts on its cover that the Chicago Tribune picked it as one of the 50 best magazines, is on the stands with its March issue, featuring a recounting of Gen. U. S. Grant’s Vicksburg campaign. It’s already springtime at Guns and Weapons, which sets its sights on the law enforcement community. The magazine’s current issue is April.
Samir Husni, a journalism professor at the University of Mississippi, explains that magazine dates are based on the last date on which they will be sold. For weekly magazines such as Time and The New Yorker, that means when they appear Monday, they always carry the following Monday’s date.
“So whenever you go to the newsstand, you always feel you are getting a fresh copy,” said Husni. “So if you go on Thursday to buy something, you see that you are getting something that is not outdated.”
The chronological conundrum becomes even more complicated in the case of Armchair General and Guns and Weapons, because they publish six and eight times a year, respectively. Each issue has to seem au courant for a long time.
“It’s a funny practice,” Husni said. “It makes people think, ‘Wow, those people can really predict the future.'”
