There are three main stamp magazines in the United States. Linns Stamp News is a weekly, and the American Philatelist and the American Stamp Dealer and Collector are monthlies. Linns has been around nearly 100 years. It is published weekly and in the days before EBAY and the Internet, it was an ad rag, often boasting hundreds of pages of advertising price lists around a core of news that seemed there mainly to meet postal regulations to qualify for the preferred second class newspaper postage rate. In my first year out of school (1975) Linns had a subscriber base of over 100,000. Today it is closer to 30,000 as the Internet has eaten in to its market. Linns runs some lightweight columns and has new issue and show news. It was once indispensable if you were a stamp professional. Today it is still useful to keep tabs on the daily and weekly happenings in the hobby.
The American Philatelist is the current dean of philatelic publications. It has been published for over 120 years and its list of editors would comprise a philatelic Hall of Fame. They include Jim Chemi, Daniel Vooys, David Lidman, Dick Sine, and Bill Welch who between them probably account for 75 years of editorship. Today it is edited by Barb Boal. The magazine is somewhat up market, with well illustrated scholarly and semi-scholarly articles. Its easy to read and it is kind of the Psychology Today of philatelic writing, straddling the market between advanced amateur to modest professional.
The American Stamp Dealer and Collector is the new kid on the block and I like it. It is originally the journal of the American Stamp Dealers Association and has expanded its market with fun and interesting stories. Its editor Randy Neil is an old stamp hand (he was the President of the APS for a while) and he solicits articles from some of the most able writers in the hobby. In another post I’ll talk about the scores of older defunct journals that can be found for the asking and still make great reading.