The Mystery Date Archive

Mystery Date: One Gal's Guide to Good Stuff is a fanzine devoted to my obsession with used books -- particularly old sex and dating manuals, etiquette and self-help books, and health, beauty and fashion guides. Look, I can't explain it -- I just love 'em. If you really want to get on my good side, give me a 40s, 50s or 60s home economics textbook. I'll be your friend forever (figuratively speaking, of course). I've been digging through thrift store book sections, rummage sales and remaindered book tables for years now. I know what it's like when your heart stops as you catch sight of something incredible, something that you never knew existed before - the ownership of which will make your life worth living, if only because you can show it off to your unsuspecting (and quite often unimpressed) friends. I'm also acquainted with the opposite: waking up in the middle of the night with the realization that only a fool would pass up Bunny Yeager's Model Diet book, and that, yes, you are that fool. (Bunny Yeager, by the way, was the pin-up model turned photographer who worked with Bettie Page, among others. Now you, too, know what a fool I am. [UPDATE 4/06 - I'm hsppy to announce that I recently bought a copy at abebooks.])

Mystery Date #1 came out in 1994; #6 in 1998. Since then I've kept busy by writing two books and "The Museum of Femoribilia" column for BUST magazine. And now I'm starting research for another book (shh, the subject matter is still a secret). I don't know when Mystery Date #7 will come out. Perhaps that should be "if" not "when," but I'm not quite ready to proclaim MD dead. It's just on an extended hiatus. After all, I have a folder marked "MD#7" filled with notes, images, and half-written articles. Oh, I suppose I could put it all online, but there's something about having a good, old-fashioned paper zine in your hands. So "indie." So "underground." So anachronistic. So very, very pleasing.

I loved researching, writing, and laying out these six issues of Mystery Date. I had wanted to do a zine ever since I saw my first punk rock zines back in Milwaukee just around the time I graduated from high school in 1979: Autonomy, See Hear, X-press. Then, when I moved to SF in 1985, my boyfriend worked at Subterranean Records, where there was a long row of file boxes filled with zines under the shipping desk: big muisc zines like Maximum Rock 'n' Roll, Flipside, and Forced Exposure, but a raft of small, personal ones, too, sometimes written with more enthusiasm than skill, but a few so compelling that it didn't matter what the subject matter was, you had to read every word.

But it wasn't until my new boyfriend and soon-to-be husband, Johnny, gave me the 1965 edition of the Mystery Date game that I knew what I wanted to write about: all those gender proscriptions and prescriptions that made me feel so ooky when I was growing up. The inaugural issue of Mystery Date: One Gal's Guide to Good Stuff soon followed.

I daydream about anthologizing Mystery Date nos. 1-6 so that everyone clamoring for copies can have them. (None of the issues are currently in print; please don't ask me to sell you any.) Until that day arrives, you'll find an article from each issue here.