In the magazine industry there is an old and mostly obsolete tradition
> of starting every subscription at the beginning of a volume (i.e., a
> year or half-year). Scholarly journals still normally do this. I
> don't know if that is what happened to you.
Thanks. Don't know if Harpers and NY Review of Books count as scholarly journals, but I'll look at the first arrivals to see.
(On the other hand when I ordered a subscription to Couloir a month into their annual subscription period last year and very clearly asked to get the initial issue that had already (just) been distributed, it never happened, and I could never get a response from them about this.)