OSSmile OSSmi1eβ

Pull up a chair. This is a little rack of genuinely public-domain magazines — science-fiction pulps and weird-tale digests, yes, but also silent-era movie mags, children’s monthlies, radio and popular-science magazines, a weekly about aeroplanes, travel, humour, and the big general-interest weeklies that landed on every porch in America — that you can read cover to cover, for free, forever, right here on OSSmile. Click READ » and the whole scanned issue opens in our own little page-turn reader — flip with the arrows, your keyboard, or a swipe; go fullscreen; no leaving, ever. 📚

The rack has two shelves now, and one drops from each, every single day. 📖 Pulp is the fiction shelf — adventure, detective, western, weird, aviation yarns, science fiction, the picture magazines. 🔧 Useful is the self-sufficiency shelf — Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, radio, the home workshop, the farm and the homestead: magazines that taught people to build, fix, grow and understand things. One to read for the pleasure of it, one to read to get better at something. Come back tomorrow and there will be two more.

Below, the rack is browsable: each shelf shows what kinds of thing are on it — detective stories, weird tales, radio and electronics, the home workshop — with a cover, a count and a line about each. Pick one and every issue in it is on a single page. Pick a shelf instead and you also get its whole directory of mastheads: Amazing Stories in one place, every Popular Mechanics we have in another. 🗄

Every title here is public domain, on exactly one of three grounds, and each issue says which on its own card: published in the US before 1930 (public domain by age); published 1930–1963 and never renewed in its 28th year, checked against the Catalog of Copyright Entries per issue; or explicitly given away by the people who owned it — 73 Magazine is here because Wayne Green’s family signed a permission and the Internet Archive keeps the signed page. Titles we could not find a real, linkable grant for are simply not on the rack. Most read right here on OSSmile in our own page-turn reader; a couple that we can’t paginate on-site (a plain-text edition and a loose-page bundle) send you to the Internet Archive to read, and say so on the button. Wholesome covers only — this is a family newsstand. (Scans currently stream from the Internet Archive while we finish moving them to our own shelves.) 📖

And because public domain means yours, some issues also have a green ⬇ FREE button: that downloads the complete issue — the real thing, the whole magazine, in its native format — straight from our own shelves. Keep it, print it, mail it to a friend, put it on a floppy. Nobody has to ask anybody. The rest read here on-site while we work through moving their files onto our own shelf, and simply don’t show a button until there is genuinely something behind it — no dead links, no “coming soon”. 💾