Asbestos Industry Magazines

Our Library collects the asbestos industry's own record: the companies' letters and memos, the reports government agencies wrote, the research doctors published, and the magazines the industry printed for itself. Those magazines were written for people inside the business, not for the public or a courtroom. They show what the companies made and sold, where their plants and mines were, and what the trade said about dust and disease at the time.

That record still matters. An advertisement in a 1950s issue, a plant pictured in an employee magazine, a contract announced in the company news: details like these can help show who made the products a worker was around, and when.

We have six magazines so far, and every issue is free to read online or download. Each archive has a page for every year, with that year's issues and an index of their articles by topic.

Asbestos, the trade monthly (1919–1981)

Asbestos was the industry's trade journal, published monthly in Philadelphia from July 1919. It carried mining and market reports, new products, company news and advertising for the whole trade. We have about 700 issues, with every one from 1919 to 1961 and most of those from the 1960s and 1970s. To start with the health record, read what the magazine told the industry about dust and disease.

Johns-Manville's employee magazines

Johns-Manville, for decades the largest asbestos company in the United States, printed its own magazines for its workers. Our copies come from J-M's own archive.

• The J-M Circle (1928–1930) was the company's monthly, written "by, for, and about" its employees: 31 issues, with a memorial edition and two plant editions.
• J-M News Pictorial (1959–1972), later News/Pic, was its picture magazine for employees, retirees and their families: 114 issues.

Manville's own account of its history, written for its employees in 1983, is "125 Proud Years".

Turner Brothers' Asbestos (1918–1920)

Turner Brothers Asbestos Company of Rochdale, later Turner & Newall, was Britain's leading asbestos firm. Its quarterly house magazine, Asbestos, was written for its staff, workpeople and customers: all 12 issues, January 1918 to October 1920, with the firm's own technical articles on the fibre, its mines and asbestos-cement.

The Asbestos Worker, the insulators' union journal (1912–1963)

The insulators who covered pipes and boilers with asbestos had their own magazine. The Asbestos Worker is the journal of their union, the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers: 200 issues from 1912 to 1963, with the union's dealings with Johns-Manville, Keasbey & Mattison, Philip Carey and Armstrong Cork, the materials its members handled, and what its members were told about the dust.

The Industrial Hygiene Digest (1939–1957)

Industry also paid for its own health research. The Air Hygiene Foundation, later the Industrial Hygiene Foundation, at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh, sent its member companies a monthly digest of the medical and engineering literature on occupational disease. The Industrial Hygiene Digest archive holds Johns-Manville's own copies: 11 issues from 1939 to 1957 and part of a twelfth from 1968, including the 1955 abstract of Richard Doll's finding that lung cancer was "a specific hazard of asbestos workers."

For the story these papers tell, read Asbestos History. If you have issues we are missing, we would like to hear from you.