I have no problem admitting it. I have an addiction and it is not an easy one to shake. There are no hotlines to call or group therapy sessions to attend. You have to deal with it and the rest of your family suffers along with you.

Drinking? Smoking? Drugs? No, sir. What I’m talking about is not being able to throw a goddamn thing away your entire life. Boxing up this shit and transferring it with you every time you move.

In my case, it is books and magazines. (OK, throw in some old EC horror comics, too.) Since I was a kid, I always enjoyed collecting different publications. It started with "Mad" magazine (still have #25, which was the second issue in magazine form) and then it morphed into sports titles.

Preview issues, game programs, scorecards, yearbooks, media guides…you name it and I held onto it. I picked up stuff at games and baseball card shops and just about anywhere else I knew of. I have a large closet in my house that has cardboard boxes piled on one another that contain some of my gems. Those are just the ones that I don’t look at often enough to justify keeping in close range. A few bookshelves in my home office are overflowing with hardcovers, paperbacks and magazines that predated World War II. Don’t go near my Brooklyn Dodger collection or else!

Over the years reading the muscle magazines, I did hold onto a good number of them but wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to get my hands on some of the older titles and issues but these were not as easy to find as the team sports stuff.

Enter eBay. The pack rat’s wet dream. A 24-hour worldwide garage sale. I went to town bidding on the older bodybuilding magazines and came up with a few really good buys. Some “Strength and Health” issues from the 1930s, “Your Physique” (the precursor of “Muscle & Fitness”) from the ‘40s and even some later stuff like Dan Lurie’s “Muscle Training Illustrated” and “WBF Bodybuilding Lifestyles.”

I had my sights set on some of the “Muscular Development” issues from it’s early days and even won a few auctions for issues from 1966. But I was not content and wanted the one that started it all – January 1964.

I believed I had one when I placed what I thought to be a more than fair amount on a collection of the first 12 issues of MD – the entire inaugural year! Of course my main objective was to get Number One, but it was well worth it to go for a grab bag like that.

If you’ve ever had something an inch from your hand and then snatched away, that is exactly how I felt when someone placed a higher bid on the auction with 10 seconds left. I scrambled to place another one but time had expired. I was pissed off and even more determined to make sure that this would never happen to me again.

About a week later I found MD #1 on an auction by itself. The condition was not as good as the one I lost out on but I didn’t care. I immediately plunked down an amount that was more than I was comfortable with, especially for just one magazine. But there was no way I was going to let some son-of-a-bitch get the best of me twice.

Lo and behold, I won the auction and was the proud owner of the object of my desire. A week or so later, the magazine arrived in the mail and it was an amazing feeling to open the envelope and hold an original copy of it in my hands. To see the photo of John Grimek on the cover and flip through the pages made all of that aggravation well worth it. (Although I was aware of it from the other issues I already had, it was still interesting to see that MD was once a York Barbell/Bob Hoffman publication.)

Now that my MD # 1 is in its rightful place on my shelf enclosed in a Mylar protective sleeve and a cardboard backing, I could sleep easier. That is until I get that urge again to fill in the rest of the 1964 series.