Rolling Stone Cover to Cover: The First 40 Years

Rolling Stone Cover to Cover: The First 40 Years

Bondi, 2007

Bondi Digital Publishing was a firm founded by David Anthony and Murat Aktar in 2004 as a producer of DVDs of archived magazines, releasing these DVDs in a higher-end, boxed set format. 

In 2007 Bondi published Rolling Stone Cover to Cover, Playboy Cover to Cover: the 50s, and Playboy Cover to Cover: the 60s. Alas, that was it for Bondi Digital Publishing; while in a 2007 interview Anthony hinted at additional magazine archiving projects, the company later suspended operations. 

In 2022 a firm called Pugpig announced they had acquired Bondi Digital. Pugpig makes digital archives of content for publishers (such as High Times, Esquire, and Creem), so they can sell access to this content as part of their subscription model.

It's possible to get the Rolling Stone: Cover to Cover DVD set for very affordable prices. The item is packaged in a study gateway box that has magnetic closures. There are four DVDs, one with the installer program / Bondi Reader app, while the other three cover select intervals in the publishing history of the magazine (1967 -1983, 1984 - 1995, 1996 - 2007)

I use Windows 10 on my PC, and while I could install the Bondi Reader app, it wouldn't work. So I downloaded a patch that is available at this link. After installing the patch, I could load a content DVD and access it without any problems. Further information on troubleshooting the Rolling Stone set is available here.

Along with the DVDs you get a trade paperback book that provides a chronological overview of the high points in the magazine's history.

As for the DVD content, well, it was generated using scanning technology as it was in the mid-2000s, so it's not going to be very crisp or legible. Indeed, looking at the magazine pages on my 32-inch monitor takes some fiddling and zooming in, particularly with the older issues from the 60s and 70s and early 80s. Things improve as the 80s progress. But with no file, will the DVDs provide what nowadays is considered 'high resolution'. 

Scrolling through the files on the DVD, I recognize why I was never a big fan of Rolling Stone. I couldn't stand the magazine's deification of people like John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Hunter Thompson, Bruce Springsteen, Bono Vox, old black bluesmen.........its willingness to jump on the superficial and trendy.

That said, there are worthy articles in every third or fourth issue. Those published in the 70s and 80s, before there were internet-based protocols for vetting content, are likely to have more than a little specious content. But that's how it was in those long-ago days, when you couldn't simply sit down and fact-check a story using the internet.

Summing up,  Baby Boomers who are nostalgic for the pop culture of their youth are going to be interested in Rolling Stone: Cover to Cover. It's not the most accessible package in terms of compatibility with modern technology: you can't read it on a tablet, or a smartphone, and reading it on a laptop's smaller screen is going to be tiring. But if you're willing to access the content on the larger screen of a PC, then investing in the box is a worthwhile idea.