Difference in "On Sale Date" And "Cover Dates"

[CrazyMax46]

Myself and someone are contemplating a podcast where we read through the interesting parts of gaming magazines from the current month X years ago. For example an episode now would focus on issues released in the month of April from a certain year. The problem lies in that if I remember correctly certain magazines cover dates would be different from an actual on sale date. For example a magazine dated April 1993 may actually have been released the previous month or even released in January or Febuary.

Therefore I'm wondering if anyone has the on sale dates for various magazines so that way I can gather multiple magazines released in the same month. Or if there's some sort indication in the major mags (EGM, GamePro etc.) when the on sale dates were.

[E-Day]

Every magazine is like that. I never got an answer to why the cover month was ahead of the actual month. When I was subscribed to Maximum PC not long ago, I would often get an issue over a month before it's month. I would get the December issue the last week of October.

For your purpose, you can just do what magazines do when looking back and use the cover date. I don't think anyone is going to complain, or even remember that that May issue of EGM was written in February and on newsstands at the end of March

[kitsunebi]

I've always heard it said that the cover date was set ahead because it helped ensure that stores would leave the mag on the shelf for a longer period of time.  Customers don't want to buy "old" magazines past their cover date, so many stores would pull all magazines dated "January" as soon as February 1st rolled around.  So let's say a mag dated "January" was released the last week of January - it would only be on sale for a week before being pulled.  But if that same mag dated "January" had been released in November, it could have stayed on shelves for a couple of months (or at least an entire month, supposing the store pulled the remaining copies as soon as the next month's issue arrived).