Asbestos Magazine: The Archive, 1919–1981

Asbestos was the asbestos industry's own trade monthly, published in Philadelphia from July 1919. Its pages carried the industry's news, mining and market reports, new products, company histories and advertising, decade after decade. This archive holds every issue we have found: about 700 of them, free to read online or download.

How to use the archive

Each year has its own page with that year's issues and an index of the articles they printed, grouped by topic. Choose an article in the index and the issue opens at its page. For most years the index is the magazine's own: it printed a topical index each December (we have those for 1919 to 1968, 1970 to 1972, and 1975 to 1980), and a cumulative index covers 1919 to 1930. Where no printed index has turned up, we compiled one from each issue's contents page, under the same topic headings the magazine used.

What the archive covers

• July 1919 to December 1961: every issue, from the Internet Archive's scans of the microfilm.
• 1962: no issues yet, but the magazine's index for the year survives and is listed.
• July 1963 to June 1973, and July 1975 to June 1981: issues from our own collection, most of them from microfilm.

The issues from July 1973 to June 1975, and those after June 1981, are still missing. If you have copies, we would like to hear from you.

Why it matters

The magazine is a record of what the industry made, sold and discussed, year by year. Historians and lawyers use it to show which companies made which products, and what the trade knew and said about dust and disease. In 1935 the magazine's editor asked Raybestos-Manhattan's Sumner Simpson whether to publish on asbestosis; the reply from Johns-Manville's Vandiver Brown became part of the Sumner Simpson Papers.

In 1986, in the midst of the asbestos litigation, Manville had every issue from 1919 to 1953 read and summarized. Its reviewer's 1,689 notes appear on each year's page, linked to the pages they cite, and the full Manville summary is in the Library. The few notes on dust, disease and worker safety are gathered in What Asbestos Magazine Told the Industry About Dust and Disease.

Rights

Issues from 1919 to 1930 are in the public domain by age. Those from 1931 to 1963 are in the public domain because their copyrights were never renewed. Later issues are republished under fair use, for research and historical study.