When are magazines released

Question

Don't they come out a month early? For example, wouldn't September's Vogue be on stands in August? August 1st? Or some later day in august... perhaps the 15th? Anyone know?

Answer 1

From Wikipedia:

"In the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, the standard practice is to display on magazine covers a date which is some weeks or months in the future from the actual publishing/release date. There are two reasons for this discrepancy: first, to allow magazines to continue appearing "current" to consumers even after they have been on sale for some time (since not all magazines will be sold immediately), and second, to inform newsstands when an unsold magazine can be removed from the stands and returned to the publisher or be destroyed."

Answer 2

In other words from the Wikipedia answer:

You don't want to sell a magazine with an expired date. If it is August 2, 2008, you don't want to have a magazine dated July 5 on the newsstand. So for the weeklies, the magazine is dated with the last date that it will be on sale. For the monthlies, a September issue probably will be superseeded by a new issue in late August.

Great story along those lines -- when Hugh Hefner put out the first edition of Playboy, he didn't know how it would do, and whether there would be a second issue soon. So there was no date on it.