How it all started. My first "holy grail"- the true first issue of Look Magazine.

Since I've been asked by an ephemera blogger named Marty Weil to write about how my interest in magazines got started, I thought I'd also share the story with you as well.

My interest was initiated in 1972, when I walked into the now long-defunct Acme Bookstore on Clark Street in Chicago. I came in looking for antiquarian medical books (I bought a beautiful anatomy atlas) and saw the first issue of Life and Look. The February 1937 Look issue has Herman Goering on the cover and when I looked inside, it said “volume 1 number 2”, despite ample documentation that it was indeed the “first issue”. When I inquired of the proprietor (a thin man named Roy) about what happened to “volume 1 number 1” said he didn’t know. I was hooked. It took fifteen years to find the answer. It was a larger, very fragile issue, essentially a “dummy” mocked up for internal use of the publisher in Des Moines, Iowa. My then “holy grail”, I obtained one at great expense in the late eighties and have only seen (and owned) one other of this truly ephemeral magazine.

I doubt you'll ever run across a copy of this magazine. If you do, expect to pay upwards of $5000 for it.