Aeroplane Magazine 1940 – 1944

Thank you, Ex Brat. Obviously I don’t frequent those places – or, at least, insufficiently frequently. Maybe I should put a standing search there.

All old Flight are freely available on line and downloadable for private use. So unless you like to actually possess them there wouldn’t be much of a market I would have thought.

I have bought, on Ebay a few odd older copies of of The Aeroplane but soon found that the wartime issues did not contain much of interest other than the adverts, presumably for security reasons. Cost was usually around £2-£3 including postage.

Then a bundle of about 50 came up starting at 99p. They were, IIRC, 40s,50s and 60s. I was a little surprised to get them for about £5. It turned out that the guy selling them had no interest in them but was at a tip when somebody was throwing them away and thought somebody would be interested in them.
I was too embarrassed to give him £5 so gave him £20 and a thank you for saving them.

Like everything I suppose the value is in the eye of the beholder. Certainly prices do seem to vary a lot and, in general, to interested parties I would have said unexpectedly low.

Where did you offer them for sale, Ex Brat?

I saw the adverts as being a way to promote our effort during the war,
a kind of positive propaganda if you like.

BTW There are three more piles of mags in The Needle Makers Antique market in Lewes, East Sussex if interested.

On the subject of old magazines and books I was given a large format wartime magazine with a blue cover and the RAF crest.
Inside it is very similar to Aeroplane, lots of adverts and sepia pictures of RAF aircraft.
Seems it was produced to raise funds because inside the front cover are stamps, as if you had to buy so many stamps and affix them
to the magazine for some reason.

I’ll dig it out the loft if interested.
If it’s rare would be happy to donate it to a museum but I suspect it was mass produced.

Beermat’s question about the effectiveness of wartime advertising for manufacturers whose production would be pretty much already consumed by wartime government contracts raises an interesting point. Was the advertising an effort to show the patriotism of the advertiser, a genuine effort to seek new customers or perhaps just a part of the desire to keep their names in the private consumers’ eye until peace was restored? I know it was prevalent in US magazines of the period but did similar magazines produced in Axis countries have the same sorts of apparently redundant advertisements?

Increasingly rare to find in circulation. Back in the 80’s it seemed a rummage in the magazine pile of any second hand book shop would net a few copies of ‘Aeroplane’. Now.. hardly ever. I think it’s to do with generations – they would be junk from late Grandad’s attic the first time around and a ‘job lot’ or house clearance sold to the bookshop. Now survivors are part of people’s cherished collections, and rarely get ‘job lotted’ out to bookshops or even car boots.

You got a bargain there – people are asking a fiver for just one. And yes, perfect time capsules – and the ads can teach a lot about aircraft manufacture, often being quite literal and illustrated very carefully. If the Germans really were interested in how we made aeroplanes as was (perhaps arrogantly) thought, they would have studied the ads, not the articles!

I often wonder whether the ads were really worth it. Would a manufacturer really choose a DH prop over Rotol for the new design because an ad in ‘Aeroplane’? It’s not like Joe Smith or Sidney Camm would go ‘Oh, de Havilland – not heard of them, let’s give their propellers a try’. Same goes for Dowty hydraulics, and many other prolific and frequent advertisers of the time.