In publishing, anniversary issues sit in the ambiguous space between news and marketing. News because, at 40 years and counting, it’s not every magazine that makes it to middle age in these times. Marketing because it’s all a bit brash, like asking for presents on your birthday.

However, it’s worth noting that Quality Digest isn’t alone in reaching this milestone. During the past 40 years, quality as an industry has also grown up, and that’s definitely worth writing about.

Every issue of QD, from that first, digest-sized publication—real paper, print, and binding—to our current website and electronic daily delivery, are archived. So for this 40th-anniversary issue (the first of two), we QDers meandered to the storeroom, blew dust off the slumbering boxes of old issues, and took a look. Here’s what I saw.

 …