2090 will be here sooner than you think

Welcome to the 65th-anniversary-edition of the Trailer/Body Builders Buyers Guide.

Maria Singletary has been mailing industry suppliers to collect these listings for longer than I’m allowed to say (yes, she’s still using stamps and envelopes to send out forms—though more recent efforts have included fax machines and the internet). She tells tale of her days at Tunnell Publications, the Houston-based publishing house that begat numerous titles, including the still extant TBB, Bulk Transporter, and Refrigerated Transporter.

And when I say publishing house, that’s exactly what I mean: The enterprise was run from a family home for years.

When TBB was launched in 1959, as a pivot from Tunnell’s baking and dairy industry B2B magazines, Dwight Eisenhower was president, Alaska and Hawaii were brand new states, and NASA had just named its first set of astronauts. That’s when Charles Tunnell, his daughter Wanda (still affectionately remembered to many current readers as Tod) and her husband and founding editor, Paul Schenck, decided that they could do something no one else was doing—produce a magazine specifically for manufacturers and upfitters of commercial trucks and trailers.

The first Buyers Guide rolled off the presses in August 1960, Volume 1, Issue 10.

“I remember when we had to work two weeks straight at the end, even on Saturday and Sunday, and there was no A/C in the building,” Maria recalls. “In South Texas. In July. And the tape would not stick to the light tables because it was so humid.” (For those unfamiliar, she’s referring to some of the primitive tools used in publishing before computers and desktop copyediting software replaced X-Acto knives and glue. FYI, that’s where the term “cut-and-paste” comes from.)

The reader might notice that this Buyers Guide is almost three times larger than many current magazines, but you should’ve seen them back in the day. I remember when I started at TBB in 2017 browsing through the morgue (another semi-archaic publishing term, referring to the room where back issues are stacked, along with the bound volumes for each year. The Buyers Guides were easy to spot in the stacks: They weren’t quite the Sears catalog (ask a boomer, kids) or a telephone directory (ask a boomer), but they were several hundred pages long and had some heft to them.

As Maria tells it, Ray Anderson, Wanda’s son and recently retired TBB publisher, had a ceremonial way to certify the success of the Buyers Guide. Each summer when the copies arrived, he would gather the staff and drop the magazine to appreciate the thump it made when it hit the floor.

Of course, a lot has changed since then—for TBB and publishing. The original Tunnell Publications has changed hands several times in the past 30 years, becoming part of larger and larger organizations. When Covid prompted work-from-home, the Houston office was closed never to reopen.

And magazines around the country have abandoned print. But TBB is an outlier, still publishing 12X. Of course, that’s because the founders’ original idea still holds: Find an underserved market and serve it. As I’ve mentioned here before, I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to visit a manufacturing facility or a dealership and see copies of TBB on desks or reception tables—or, even cooler, framed enlargements of covers or feature stories on the wall. And, more often than not, someone will mention the importance of the Buyers Guide.

A time may come when the B2B media audience will no longer support print (I’ve been hearing this for 20 years), but it’s not today.

So when this latest Buyers Guide arrives in my mailbox, I will raise it high in a ceremonial salute to Ray and Maria, Dan who leads our sales, Jason who wrote this month’s cover story and who will be leading TBB in the not-too-distant future (yes, I too was born in 1959), and to Jen, our new art director (and I hope she’ll still be around in August). But mainly this will be a salute to you, our readers: the manufacturers, upfitters, dealers, and suppliers who have made TBB strong over these 65 years.

The thud it makes when it hits the floor might not be the same (different paper stock—that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) but it will be every bit as rewarding. Maybe more so.

Who’s up for 2090?