It’s Summertime, and the Reading of These Anniversary Issues Is Easy

E rleichda!

For the unenlightened, that word, painted on the tailgate of legendary hot-rod pin-striper Shakey Jake’s custom pickup, roughly translates as: Lighten up. At least that’s what Rod & Custom magazine informed its readers.

And that seems like good advice for mid-July reading.

Three magazines celebrate anniversaries this summer, and each one, somehow, seems appropriate for contemplation as the dog days loom.

When it was launched in 1981, Islands seemed one of the longest shots for magazine survival. After a few obligatory stories on “The Art of the Luau” and “Tahiti, Paradise Found,” what would be left to say about land masses surrounded by water?

The August issue answers that question with a retrospective collection of stories demonstrating that islands have an almost mythic ability to inspire writers. Clearly, hedonism is part of the appeal. But these articles point to cerebral satisfactions as well.

Judging from the letters in this issue, it’s obvious that many readers do actually read this magazine and then take off island hopping. But the magazine also is a fantasy island unto itself, a perfect escape hatch to open beside the back-yard Doughboy.

A catalogue of 10 best lists--10 Books for a Desert Island, 10 Classic Island Movies, 10 Rip-Roaring River Runs--is fun. The photo essay, “Ten Ways of Looking at an Island” by 10 top photographers, offers beautiful and unexpected impressions.

But the real draw of this anniversary issue is the features, which were selected from 10 years’ worth of contributions.

“The ideal island is a whole world, and what a world,” Paul Theroux writes. “Size is incidental. Where insularity is concerned, completeness is everything, and even a tiny island may contain multitudes.”

Theroux should know. He spent months paddling from island to island throughout the South Pacific in a collapsible solo kayak. His account of those adventures is travel writing at its best.

Michael Parfit’s “Recollections” is writing about travel writing at its best. On a Greenpeace voyage to Antarctica, Parfit rediscovers “the greatest joy of writing: sharing life and adventure with an assortment of odd people on some distant fringe of the world.”

In Washington state’s San Juan Islands he has an epiphany: “The people who survive on these islands are the ones who let the terrible beauty drive them into each other’s arms.”

Anyone who has traveled beyond the city limits of his hometown has uncovered the great white lie of most travel publications: that photograph of a pristine beach is framed in such a way as to exclude the Jack-in-the-Box to the right.

Island’s pictures do tend to romanticize. But the magazine’s prose doesn’t.

And the islands of Islands aren’t all of the tropical paradise variety. Ireland is an island. Singapore is an island. There are 14,000 more in Minnesota’s Lake of the Woods.

With luck, the publication will hang on long enough to send Theroux, Parfit and the other writers included here--Jan Morris and Herb Gold, among others--to all of them.

* Travelers who prefer larger land masses may be more interested in the 50th anniversary issue of Trailer Life.

More than a decade before Lucy and Desi publicized recreational vehicles in the film “The Long, Long Trailer,” Trailer Life was celebrating the budding phenomenon of going “camping” with all the comforts of home.

The trailers and RVs featured in this five-decade retrospective range from humongous land yachts to tiny tent trailers. All, however, reflect an ingenuity, an oddly American instinct--dating to the Conestoga wagon, perhaps--for efficiently packing complete living quarters into compact rolling cocoons.

Even Winnebago-bashing eco-purists are likely to be charmed by the nostalgic old timers’ letters: “My wife, Dorothy, and I were married April 16, 1938, and our first home was a 17-foot Glider trailer, towed with a 1933 straight 8-cylinder Pontiac coupe. . . .”

* Finally, almost every self-respecting Southern Californian went through a hot-rod phase. Some, it turns out, never succumbed to the more pragmatic era of Hondas and Hyundais.

The August Rod & Custom is billed as the magazine’s 25th Anniversary issue. That’s a bit misleading because the magazine was belly up for 15 of those years.

Still, anyone who ever ogled a GTO will see this issue as a milestone worth celebrating.

Take the magazine to the beach. Slap a Jan and Dean tape in the boom box. Then kick back and groove on the full-color portraits of Ed (Big Daddy) Roth’s infamous Beatnik Bandit. Feel the surge of adrenaline that only a faded candy-pearl purple paint job can evoke. Luxuriate in the ads for such items as Mustang tubular strut rod kits.

To paraphrase the immortal word of Tom Wolfe: Vrrrooooom !

REQUIRED READING

The June 17 New Republic featured a piece by Jacob Weisberg on what he sees as the abysmal state of book publishing. The story, which accuses the publishing industry of favoring fluff over substance, hasty and slipshod editing and general greed, among other sins, arrived during the American Booksellers Convention. Judging by its impact, you’d have thought Crown Books announced it was putting the industry’s entire fall list on the $1 shelves.

In response, the July 15 and 22 issue of the magazine includes 35 letters from a distinguished cast of authors, including Robert Sam Anson, Sanford J. Ungar, Charles Murray, Bob Woodward and (teaming up in one letter) Frances Fitzgerald, Richard Reeves, Garry Wills, J. Anthony Lukas, Taylor Branch and Richard Barnet.

All but two of the letters express outrage, indignity or revulsion with Weisberg, and many excoriate the writer for alleged inaccuracies. Weisberg parries nicely, though, admitting to only one typo.