I'm not inviting anyone else to do this but Marcus Bressler sent me his recollections of discovering MAD magazine…
I was introduced to MAD magazine by my "cool" cousin in NY. He had given me one of his copies to take home with me to my latest address in Norristown (Blue Bell), PA. I somehow forgot about it until one morning I felt ill and had to stay home from school. My mother was to take me to a doctor appointment and I needed some reading material (I still do to this day — I am not the kind to sit and meditate or be still) and while searching, I found that MAD magazine. It was one of the early ones that I specifically remember because on its back cover, it had a representation of those composition books that schoolkids had to use to write assignments in. The idea was you could sneak your MAD into school by laying it upside down amongst your other books and the teacher would never know.
Anyway, I was reading it in the waiting room when the nurse called us into our appointment and my mother made me leave it there — "Don't bring that in with you," she instructed. I complied and left it on a side table with other magazines such as Highlights for Children, which I found boring.
Of course the story concludes with us leaving the doctor's office with a prescription but not with my only copy of MAD. I forgot about it until we got home and I couldn't even think about asking my mother to take me back to get it. I regret losing that MAD to this day.
MAD actually did the composition book gag twice. In 1955, Harvey Kurtzman made the front cover of #20 (a comic book issue) look like a composition book and then his successors put a composition book on the back cover of #64, which was the July, 1961 issue. It was a clever gag and I'll bet the only thing that stopped them from doing it again is that students stopped using composition books.
You had a copy of #64, Marcus. The back cover looked like a real composition book and if you looked real closely at the border around the center label, you'd see in tiny type: "This cover specially designed so teacher won't spot student reading MAD in class…this cover also designed so principal won't spot teacher reading MAD in lounge…also so school board won't spot principal reading MAD…also so students won't spot school board reading MAD."
And the gag was all the funnier when you realized that this was on the back cover of that issue of MAD. So if the students, teacher, principal or school board were trying to read MAD and look like they were reading a composition book, they were going to have to be reading it upside-down.