Magazines You Miss: From Skateboarder to Metropolitan Home, but Mainly Gourmet

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY and NOAM COHEN

After more than 140 responses, what can we conclude from the answers of Media Decoder readers to the question, what magazine do you miss the most?

Gourmet, which published its last issue in November 2009, was the dearest of the dearly departed - appearing in more than a quarter of the comments left, a reaction that mirrored that huge response Media Decoder received when it reported the news about the magazine's closing.

Readers longed for the section that reviewed cookbooks and especially the holiday issues in November and December. One commenter, appearing under the journalistic nomme de plume Hildy Johnson, wrote, “I've tried filling the void with Bon Appetit or Saveur, but it's like eating nonfat yogurt instead of fresh custard.”

Other top contenders for most missed magazine included Spy, Talk, George, McCall's and House and Garden. (Bird Talk, which stopped printing this m onth prompting our question in the first place, got a few shout-outs as well.)

Readers wrote how they loved the way Spy used to rankle Donald Trump and how Talk Magazine was ahead of the curve on helicopter parenting. One vote for George, the magazine co-founded by John Kennedy Jr., appeared cynical: “Just because it was a great example of our media's navel-gazing and infatuation with celebrity in all its forms.”

Many readers took the question loosely, grieving over still-published magazines that commenters wrote had lost their way, stalwarts like The New Yorker (“which published really long, really substantive articles”), Rolling Stone (“when it mattered”), The New York Times magazine (“that used to be printed in a font size that was comfortably readable and wasn't the physical size of a comic book”) and Scientific American (when it “had a number of monthly columns like ‘The Amateur Scientist' that were gems of originality and laboratory crea tivity”).

With a similar looseness, some plainly “missed” magazines that they had only known in the past tense, like Alanis, who nominated The Masses, the radical magazine that was closed by the United States government in the red scare of 1917. Either that, or our readers are older than we thought.

A few commenters even listed catalogs, whether from B. Altman or Bonwitt Teller or more generally, as News Viewer wrote, “What kid didn't drool over the Christmas toy catalog?“

The comments often told a story. Some, sparingly, through a list of titles,like Erica's “Flair, Look, Gourmet, Connoisseur”; or Julie's “East-West Journal, Spy”; or JPL's “Premiere, Magazine of Invention and Technology, Biography, Psychotronic Film.”

Others, by telling of their experience following a single publication, as DennisD did: “I sorely miss Country Journal - a great magazine on rural living that I discovered in 1983, th en published by Blair & Ketchum. It had nice photos, informative how-to articles, and featured essayists such as Noel Perrin, Wendell Berry, Charles Elliott , etc. It later mutated into a suburbanite magazine, changed ownership and editors multiple times, and died a slow death by 2002. No magazine has ever filled its niche.”

The most intense reactions seemingly were for the magazines that had the smallest circulations.

Charlie Samuels wrote in a tribute to Skateboarder magazine, “It was our bible, our lifeline and our ONLY way of finding out what the rest of our microcosm was doing in the late '70's. I couldn't wait for my copy to come in the mail wrapped in brown paper. Its influence shaped the movement all the way to today and had incredible ads, writers and photographers â€" it inspired me to be one.”

The Tally

Gourmet: 40
Spy: 26
Domino: 12
House and Garden: 9
Premiere: 7
Brill's Content: 6
Life: 6
George: 5
Metropolitan Home: 5
Saturday Review: 5

Among the titles that gathered single votes were New Yorker Rocker, Grand Royal,  Big Brother and Suede. The polls are still open.