Handloader: The Bimonthly Magazine Devoted Entirely to Reloading

Handloader is a bimonthly magazine published in Prescott, Arizona, for shooters who make their own ammunition. Its premise has always been unusually narrow and unusually durable: where general shooting magazines divide their pages among hunting, firearms reviews, politics and the outdoors, Handloader devotes itself to a single craft — the loading and reloading of cartridges for rifles, handguns and shotguns. The publisher, Wolfe Publishing Company, describes it as the only magazine in the world dedicated to the sport of reloading, and in 2026 the title marked sixty years of continuous publication, an anniversary its publisher celebrated with a commemorative giveaway built around two firearms chambered in .45 Colt.

Based at 2180 Gulfstream, Suite A, in Prescott, the magazine serves a readership that, by the publisher's own description, reloads for more than two dozen different calibres and shoots thousands of rounds in the process of refining a load. That intensity is the magazine's reason for existing. A handloader does not simply want to know that a cartridge works; he or she wants to know which powder, primer, case and bullet produced a given velocity, what pressure the combination generated, and how the bullet performed under particular circumstances. Handloader built its reputation by printing that kind of semi-technical detail, issue after issue, for six decades.

Overview

Handloader appears six times a year as a bimonthly title. Each issue combines long load-development features with a stable of regular columns devoted to specific parts of the craft: propellants, cartridges, bullets and brass, wildcat cartridges, product tests and practical technique. The tone is that of a technical journal written for practitioners rather than beginners browsing a newsstand, although explanatory features on subjects such as how to read loading manuals have long helped newer reloaders follow the more advanced material.

The magazine's home is Prescott, Arizona, a city with a long association with the American firearms trade. Its publisher, Wolfe Publishing, is also known for the companion title Rifle — recently presented as Rifle & Handgun Magazine — and for reference products that collect and index decades of load data, including its LoadData service and bound and digital collections of back issues. Handloader therefore sits at the centre of a small publishing ecosystem in which the magazine, its archives and its data compilations reinforce one another.

History and Founding

Handloader was founded in 1966 by Dave Wolfe. According to Wolfe Publishing's own account of the sixtieth anniversary, Wolfe left a magazine he had co-founded in order to start a publication devoted solely to handloading, at a time when many in the trade believed such a narrowly focused title would not survive. The first issue appeared in May 1966; early bibliographic records list the young magazine as The Handloader Magazine, published by the Dave Wolfe Publishing Co. in Peoria, Illinois, with Dave Wolfe as editor, before the company and its titles eventually settled in Prescott.

The scepticism Wolfe defied is easy to understand in retrospect. Reloading in the mid-1960s was a devoted hobby practised at benches in garages and basements, not a mass market. Yet the very narrowness of the subject became the magazine's protection. Because no general-interest gun magazine could justify printing page after page of pressure data and charge weights, Handloader faced little direct competition for the reader who wanted exactly that. Sixty years on, the publisher's anniversary message credited a succession of editors and writers, each personally committed to loading his own ammunition, with shaping the magazine's look, feel and voice.

Publisher and Ownership

The magazine is published by Wolfe Publishing Company of Prescott, Arizona, which operates the Wolfe Outdoor Sports storefront through which subscriptions, single issues, back issues on CD-ROM and collected volumes are sold. A print subscription has been offered at twenty-nine dollars, with new subscriptions beginning with the next issue and delivery of a first copy taking six to eight weeks — a reminder that, for all its digital extensions, Handloader remains rooted in the rhythms of print periodical publishing.

The company's catalogue shows how thoroughly the backlist is treated as an asset. Forty years of the magazine — from issue number 1 in May 1966 to issue number 238 in December 2005, more than 26,000 pages — were issued as a searchable DVD set, and individual back issues have been sold in digital form with their full tables of contents preserved. For a data-driven hobby, that archive is not nostalgia; load information published decades ago for obsolete or wildcat cartridges may be available nowhere else.

Editorial Content and Sections

The heart of the magazine is the load-development feature, and its best-known example is Pet Loads. The column, long associated with Ken Waters, takes a single cartridge and subjects it to systematic testing, reporting favoured combinations and the reasoning behind them. After Waters, Brian Pearce carried the Pet Loads tradition forward, with instalments such as his updates on the .44 Special and the .45 ACP, the latter tested in a Wilson Combat 1911 and exploring cleaner-burning powders among more conventional choices.

Around those features sits a framework of standing departments whose names recur across decades of issues. Reloader's Press, written for many years by editor Dave Scovill, addressed readers directly on current topics. Cartridge Board, by Gil Sengel, examined individual cartridges in historical and technical depth. Propellant Profiles, by R.H. VanDenburg Jr., profiled individual powders. Other recurring headings have included Bullets & Brass, From the Hip, Wildcat Cartridges, Practical Handloading and Product Tests, alongside columns by Mike Venturino devoted to older firearms and black-powder-era shooting. A single representative issue might move from neck-sizing revolver cases to the .45-70 Government, from reading loading manuals to reduced loads for practice and small game — variety within a strictly defined field.

Audience and Circulation

Handloader's audience is defined less by demographics than by behaviour. Its readers own loading presses, buy components in quantity and, as the publisher puts it, spend a great deal of money on the sport they love; subscribers are said to reload and shoot more than readers of any other related magazine. The letters and reviews the publisher displays strike the same note: readers describe reading every issue cover to cover, keeping complete bound sets of the magazine, and treating back issues as a working reference library rather than disposable reading.

That reference function explains the magazine's longevity in a difficult print market. A fashion or news magazine ages in weeks; a carefully tested set of loads for the .300 Savage or the .22 Hornet remains useful for as long as rifles chambered for those cartridges are shot. Handloader's readers therefore keep it, index it and buy its collected editions, giving the title an afterlife in the second-hand and digital-archive markets that few consumer magazines enjoy.

Print and Digital Editions

In print, Handloader is a bimonthly magazine sold by subscription and through specialist retail outlets; readers in forum discussions over the years have noted finding it at large bookstores and at newsstands willing to stock specialist shooting titles. Digitally, the magazine's world extends in several directions: the handloadermagazine.com website publishes selected features, the publisher's online store sells single issues and back issues in downloadable form, and the LoadData service turns the accumulated load information from Handloader and its sister title into a searchable database.

The archival products deserve emphasis because they are unusual in scale. The forty-year DVD collection presented more than two hundred consecutive issues as high-resolution, searchable, printable files, organised so that a reader could open any cover and turn to the exact sentence a word search located. For reloaders chasing a half-remembered article on an obscure cartridge, that searchability converted a paper archive into a practical tool.

Notable Editors and Contributors

Dave Wolfe founded the magazine and gave the company its name. Dave Scovill, long its editor, was credited by readers with guiding the title through lean years and maintaining its standards; his Reloader's Press column and features such as his work on neck-sizing revolver cases were fixtures of the magazine. Ken Waters established Pet Loads as the magazine's signature franchise, and his name remained attached to the format long after his active years, with later writers measuring their instalments against his example.

The contributing bench has been deep and stable. Brian Pearce became the most visible load-development writer of the modern era. John Barsness contributed widely read technical and reflective pieces, including examinations of bad data and of classic smallbore cartridges. Gil Sengel wrote Cartridge Board, Layne Simpson covered wildcats and long-range cartridges, Ross Seyfried and Mike Venturino brought expertise in big bores and historic arms, and writers such as Stan Trzoniec, John Haviland, Terry Wieland, Sam Fadala and Al Miller rounded out issues across the decades. The continuity of bylines is itself part of the magazine's identity: readers follow individual writers for years.

Awards and Recognition

Handloader's recognition is of a particular kind: not a shelf of general publishing prizes, but the standing of a reference authority within its sport. The publisher describes it as the number one authority in the shooting sports on handloading, and the trade's behaviour supports the claim — component and tool makers seek its product tests, its back catalogue is sold as a premium reference set, and its writers are cited in reloading forums whenever a disputed load or an obscure cartridge is discussed. Reaching a sixtieth anniversary in 2026, in a niche many predicted would fail in 1966, is itself the clearest measure of its reputation.

Recent Developments

The most visible recent milestone is the sixtieth-anniversary celebration in 2026, for which Wolfe Publishing produced two commemorative firearms chambered in .45 Colt to be given away to entrants — a promotion that deliberately linked the magazine's founding era to the single-action revolver chamberings its pages have covered for decades. In parallel, the publisher continues to extend the archive digitally, selling downloadable back issues and maintaining the searchable load database, while the print magazine continues on its bimonthly schedule from Prescott. After sixty years, the formula Dave Wolfe bet on — that reloaders would support a magazine written only for them — remains intact.