You’re most welcome, AgCat, fingers crossed all works out well and you can be there.

E-mail [email]mickoakey@theaviationhistorian.com[/email] and funeral details will be forthcoming, AgCat.

There’s another review (from a more specialist viewpoint) and further pictures here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.728575327220314.1073741827.370522009692316&type=1

The sheer numbers of mags available in the U.K. (across all subjects) never ceases to amaze. . . Is this a reflection of our long standing national preoccupation with “hobbies”? Anyway, great stuff.

It is indeed, Gspot — the UK has always been the liveliest source worldwide of magazines of all types. The Aeroflight website has an excellent listing of titles current and defunct, although it must be quite a task to keep things up to date (and The Aviation Historian is not listed yet; must get that fixed). The first one I ever bought was the April 1970 Aero Modeller — looking at it now (yup, never throw anything away), I realise that as a nine-year-old I pretty much learnt every page off by heart!

Just catching up with the question about “The Aeroplane” vs “Aeroplane Monthly”, they are/were not the same magazine, of course, but they have a shared heritage. When the weekly “The Aeroplane” closed in 1968, having been bought by the publishers of rival journal “Flight” (hmmm, history repeating itself?), its photographic archive was absorbed into that of “Flight”. A few years later Richard T. Riding — son of E.J. “Eddie” Riding of “Aero Modeller” and Harleyford books fame — who was working as a layout artist on “Flight” and would spend his lunchtimes delving in the archive, thought it would be a good idea to resurrect “The Aeroplane” but as a monthly magazine for aviation history enthusiasts. He took the idea to “Flight” publisher Maurice Smith (a DFC-holding ex-RAF Pathfinder), who gave Richard the green light, and “Aeroplane Monthly” launched in May 1973, about five years after “The Aeroplane” closed, but owned by the same company and utilising the same photographic library.

“Aeroplane Monthly” often tended to be known simply as “Aeroplane”, and indeed a lot of longstanding readers of both the weekly and the monthly saw them as one continuous publication. When Mick Oakey took over from Richard Riding as editor in 1998, he wanted to capitalise on the long heritage by dropping the word “Monthly” from the logo. This happened from the November 1998 issue onwards, although the official (registered) title remained (and remains) “Aeroplane Monthly”.

So there you have it. And although Mick Oakey has moved on from “Aeroplane” to “The Aviation Historian”, he still works every day at an Edwardian wooden desk once owned by “The Aeroplane’s” famous, bigoted and irascible founder-editor, C.G. Grey. The desk now has an iMac on it, though, rather than a fountain-pen and a monocle.

Lots of interesting points in the last few posts. Even as long ago as the mid-1980s, Aeroplane’s then publishers (IPC) were convinced that the readership was dying off. And yet the circulation continued to be pretty steady, fluctuating between about 30,000 and 38,000, for a further 25 years until IPC sold it in 2010. I believe (and demographics indicated) that the readers who faded away owing to advanced age were replaced partly by younger enthusiasts who joined as they hit the age of about 40 and became nostalgic for the aeroplanes of their youth; and partly by new readers gleaned via the internet, which is undeniably a wonderful shop-window for specialist publications. Re younger people thinking they can get everything online for nothing, research shows that’s certainly what males under 30 think; but their perception is skewed because although there is lots of free stuff on the internet, it’s not by any means all good or reliable. There continues to be a good future for specialist, in-depth publications catering mostly for the grey-haired market, in my view.