This month, with the issue cover-dated January 2000, Analog turns 70.
Climb the eight-foot wooden ladder to an attic loft overlooking the guest room in my house and you'll find one of my favorite possessions -- 751 issues of Astounding and Analog.
Representing a complete run from June 1937 to the present along with 13 previous issues dating back to November 1932, it's a huge collection that nearly fills a six-shelf aluminum restaurant rack. I keep them in the attic because they won't fit anywhere else in the house.
During last summer's heat wave, when I had to install a fan to prevent the pages of the older issues from turning brown and flaky, I was tempted to relocate them to the basement.
Fortunately, I didn't follow through with that notion because Hurricane Floyd dumped an inch of rainwater beneath our house, and it took two months to vent the mildew from the air. We lost four cartons of old comic books, but the old dogs in the attic remained high and dry.
I began reading Analog with the April 1971 issue, 11 years after its name changed from Astounding Science Fiction.
As irony would have it, the cover story of that issue was "The Unreachable Stars," a novelette by its future editor, Dr. Stanley Schmidt, illustrated by Frank Kelly Freas, the artist most commonly associated with the magazine's later years.
I was 13 years old when I purchased that issue at a Walgreen's drug store in Nashville, Tennessee. In the 28 years since then, I've seldom missed an issue and I've never thrown any away.
Analog wasn't the first SF magazine I followed on a regular basis. I found a shoebox full of Fantasy and Science Fiction in my sister Genevive's closet after she went off to college, and I'd also picked up an occasional issue of Galaxy or If.
But Analog satisfied my SF jones more often than its rivals and so, when I found myself financially able to collect vintage SF magazines many years later, it was back issues of Analog and Astounding that I sought out....
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