Beginnings in the 17th century
Though there may have been published material similar to a magazine in antiquity, especially perhaps in China, the magazine as it is now known began only after the invention of printing in the West. It had its roots in the spate of pamphlets, broadsides, ballads, chapbooks, and almanacs that printing made possible. Much of the energy that went into these gradually became channeled into publications that appeared regularly and collected a variety of material designed to appeal to particular interests. The magazine thus came to occupy the large middle ground, incapable of sharp definition, between the book and the newspaper.
The earliest magazine appears to have been the German Erbauliche Monaths-Unterredungen (1663–68; “Edifying Monthly Discussions”), started by Johann Rist, a theologian and poet of Hamburg. Soon after there appeared a group of learned periodicals: the Journal des Sçavans (later Journal des Savants; 1665), started in France by the author Denis de Sallo; the Philosophical Transactions (1665) of the Royal Society in England; and the Giornale de’ letterati (1668), published in Italy and issued by the scholar and ecclesiastic Francesco Nazzari. A similar journal was started in Germany a little later, the Acta eruditorum Lipsiensium (Leipzig; 1682); and mention may also be made of the exile-French Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (1684), published by the philosopher Pierre Bayle mainly in Holland to escape censorship. These sprang from the revival of learning, the need to review its fruits, and the wish to diffuse its spirit as widely as possible.
The learned journals summarized important new books, but there were as yet no literary reviews. Book advertisements, by about 1650 a regular feature of the newssheets, sometimes had brief comments added, and regular catalogs began to appear, such as the English quarterly Mercurius librarius, or A Catalogue of Books (1668–70). But in the 17th century the only periodicals devoted to books were short-lived: the Weekly Memorials for the Ingenious (1682–83), which offered some critical notes on books, and the Universal Historical Bibliothèque (January–March 1686). The latter invited scholarly contributions and could thus be regarded as the true forerunner of the literary review.
The lighter type of magazine, or “periodical of amusement,” may be dated from 1672, which saw the first appearance of Le Mercure Galant (renamed Mercure de France in 1714). It was founded by the writer Jean Donneau de Vizé and contained court news, anecdotes, and short pieces of verse—a recipe that was to prove endlessly popular and become widely imitated. This was followed in 1688 by a German periodical with an unwieldy title but one that well expressed the intention behind many a subsequent magazine: “Entertaining and Serious, Rational and Unsophisticated Ideas on All Kinds of Agreeable and Useful Books and Subjects.” It was issued in Leipzig by the jurist Christian Thomasius, who made a point of encouraging women readers. England was next in the field, with a penny weekly, the Athenian Gazette (better known later as the Athenian Mercury; 1690–97), run by a London publisher, John Dunton, to resolve “all the most Nice and Curious Questions.” Soon after came the Gentleman’s Journal (1692–94), started by the French-born Peter Anthony Motteux, with a monthly blend of news, prose, and poetry. In 1693, after devoting some experimental numbers of the Athenian Mercury to “the Fair Sex,” Dunton brought out the first magazine specifically for women, the Ladies’ Mercury. Finally, another note, taken up time and again later, was struck by The London Spy (1698–1700), issued by a tavern keeper, Ned Ward, and containing a running narrative of the sights and sounds of London.
Developments in the 18th century
Great Britain
With increasing literacy—especially among women—and a quickening interest in new ideas, the magazine filled out and became better established. In Britain, three early “essay periodicals” had enormous influence: Daniel Defoe’s The Review (1704–13; thrice weekly); Sir Richard Steele’s The Tatler (1709–11; thrice weekly), to which Joseph Addison soon contributed; and Addison and Steele’s The Spectator (1711–12, briefly revived in 1714; daily). Though they resembled newspapers in the frequency of their appearance, they were more like magazines in content. The Review introduced the opinion-forming political article on domestic and foreign affairs, while the cultivated essays of The Tatler and The Spectator, designed “to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality,” did much to shape the manners and taste of the age. The latter had countless imitators not only in Britain, where there were in addition the Female Tatler (1709–10) and the Female Spectator (1744–46), but also on the Continent and later in America. The Stamp Tax of 1712 had a damping effect, as intended, but magazines proved endlessly resilient, easy to start and easy to fail, then as now.
So far various themes had been tried out; they were first brought together convincingly by the English printer Edward Cave, who began to publish The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. It was originally a monthly collection of essays and articles culled from elsewhere, hence the term magazine—the first use of the word in this context. Cave was joined in 1738 by Dr. Johnson, who was later to publish his own Rambler (1750–52); thereafter The Gentleman’s Magazine contained mostly original matter, including parliamentary reports. Rivals and imitators quickly followed, notably the London Magazine (1732–85) and the Scots Magazine (1739–1817; to 1826 published as the Edinburgh Magazine); and, among the increasing number of women’s periodicals, there were a Ladies’ Magazine (1749–53) and a Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832). Their progenitor, however, outlived them all and perished only in 1907.
The literary and political rivalries of the day produced numerous short-lived periodicals, from which the critical review emerged as an established form. Robert Dodsley, a London publisher, started the Museum (1746–47), devoted mainly to books, and Ralph Griffiths, a Nonconformist bookseller, founded The Monthly Review (1749–1845), which had the novelist and poet Oliver Goldsmith as a contributor. To oppose the latter on behalf of the Tories and the Church of England, The Critical Review (1756–1817) was started by an Edinburgh printer, Archibald Hamilton, with the novelist Tobias Smollett as its first editor. Book reviews tended to be long and fulsome, with copious quotations; a more astringent note came in only with the founding of the Edinburgh Review in 1802.
The 19th century and the start of mass circulation
General Periodicals
Most of the early periodicals were designed for the few who could afford them and can be fairly called “quality” magazines. In the 1830s, however, less expensive magazines, aimed at a wider public, began to appear. At first these magazines emphasized features that promoted improvement, enlightenment, and family entertainment, but, toward the end of the century, they evolved into popular versions that aimed at providing amusement.
The pioneers of the new type of magazine in Britain were Charles Knight, publisher for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, with his weekly Penny Magazine (1832–46) and Penny Cyclopaedia (1833–58); the Chambers brothers, William and Robert, with Chambers’s (Edinburgh) Journal (1832–1956), which reached a circulation of 90,000 in 1845; and teetotaler John Cassell, with his Working Man’s Friend and Family Instructor (1850–53) and the Quiver (1861). Besides popular magazines, many standard works appeared serially, often with illustrations. Typical of family entertainment were Charles Dickens’ Household Words (1850), followed in 1859 by All the Year Round; several similar periodicals such as Good Words (1860); and, for young people, the Boy’s Own Paper (1879) and the Girl’s Own Paper (1880). Germany had its Pfennigmagazin (1833), edited by Johann Jakob Weber, and a family magazine modeled on that of Dickens. One example was the Gartenlaube (1853–1937; “Arbour”), which enjoyed great popular influence and a circulation of 400,000 in the 1870s. There were no national magazines in the United States before about 1850, but two of its best-known early periodicals were the Saturday Evening Post (1821–1969; revived 1971) and Youth’s Companion (1827–1929). The latter, published in Boston, was typically wholesome in content, intended to “warn against the ways of transgression” and to encourage “virtue and piety.”
By the last quarter of the century, largely as a result of compulsory education, the potential market for magazines had greatly increased, and the public was avid for miscellaneous information and light entertainment. The first man in Britain to discover this was George Newnes, who liked snipping out any paragraph that appealed to him. In 1881 he turned his hobby to advantage by publishing a penny magazine, Tit-Bits from all the Most Interesting Books, Periodicals and Contributors in the World, soon shortened to Tit-Bits (in 1968 restyled Titbits). It was a great success and formed the beginning of a publishing empire that was to include Country Life (founded 1897), Wide World Magazine (1898), and, above all, The Strand Magazine (1891–1950), one of the first monthly magazines of light literature with plenty of illustrations. The Strand became enormously popular and is perhaps most famous for its Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. Among the early contributors to Tit-Bits was Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe), who had an appetite for odd bits of information similar to that of Newnes. In 1888, after editing Youth and Bicycling News, Harmsworth launched a rival to Tit-Bits called Answers to Correspondents, or Answers, which he successfully promoted by contests. Within five years he produced a string of inexpensive magazines for the same popular market, including Comic Cuts and Home Chat. A similar empire was built up by Arthur Pearson, another former Tit-Bits employee, with Pearson’s Weekly and Home Notes, among others.
In the United States, magazine publishing boomed as part of the general expansion after the Civil War. It was also helped by favourable postal rates for periodicals (1879). But a gulf remained between expensive magazines aimed at the genteel, such as Harper’s and Scribner’s (see below Literary and scientific magazines), and cheaper weeklies and miscellanies. The first person to produce a popular monthly to fill this gap and thus spark off a revolution in the industry was Samuel Sidney McClure, who began publishing McClure’s Magazine in 1893, which he sold for 15 cents an issue instead of the usual 25 or 35 cents. John Brisben Walker, who was building up Cosmopolitan (founded 1886) after acquiring it in 1889, cut his price to 12 1/2 cents, and in October 1893 Frank A. Munsey reduced the price of Munsey’s Magazine (1889–1929) to 10 cents. All three saw that, by keeping down the price and gearing contents to the interests and problems of the average reader, high circulations were attainable. Munsey estimated that, between 1893 and 1899, “the ten-cent magazine increased the magazine-buying public from 250,000 to 750,000 persons.” This increase in circulation in turn led to high advertising revenue, making it possible to sell a magazine, like a newspaper, for less than its cost of production, a practice that was to become common in the next century. Technical development was also important; mass-production methods and the use of photoengraving processes for illustration enabled attractive magazines to be produced at ever lower unit costs.
The first magazine published in Australia was the Australian Magazine, which began in 1821 and lasted for 13 monthly issues. The South Asian Register began as a quarterly in 1827 but only four issues appeared. The Hobart Town Magazine (1833–34) survived a bit longer and contained stories, poems, and essays by Australian writers. The Sydney Literary News (1837) was the first to contain serial fiction and advertisements. Illustrations were introduced in the 1840s; the Australian Gold Digger’s Monthly Magazine and Colonial Family Visitor (1852–53) was followed by the Melbourne Punch (1855–1925; incorporated in Table Talk, 1885–1937).
In India the first magazines were published by the British. The earliest to appear was the Oriental Magazine; or, Calcutta Amusement (1785–86); it was followed by a number of short-lived missionary publications. The first periodical founded and edited by an Indian was the Hindustan Review, which commenced in 1900.
Missionaries founded the first periodical in China; printed in Malacca, the Chinese Monthly Magazine lasted from 1815 to 1822. It was followed by the East-West Monthly Magazine, printed in Canton from 1833 to 1837 and in Singapore from 1837 until its end in 1847.
Illustrated Magazines
The first man in Britain to notice the effect of illustrations on sales and grasp their possibilities was a newsagent in Nottingham, Herbert Ingram, who moved to London in 1842 and began publishing The Illustrated London News, a weekly consisting of 16 pages of letterpress and 32 woodcuts. It was successful from the start, winning the approval of the Archbishop of Canterbury and hence that of the clerical public. Though it suffered at first from the defect that its pictures were by well-known artists but were not taken from life, it later sent artists all over the world. Drawings made on the spot during the South African War, sometimes at considerable risk, were a great popular feature. Among its competitors was the monthly English Illustrated Magazine (1883–1913).
The idea of presenting the news largely in pictures was quickly taken up in France by L’Illustration (1843–1944) and in Germany by the Leipziger illustrierte Zeitung (1843) and Die Woche (1899–1940).
In the United States, the main early illustrated magazines were Leslie’s Weekly (1855–1922) and Harper’s Weekly (1857). Soon after its founding, Leslie’s had a circulation of 100,000, which doubled or trebled whenever there was something sensational to portray. During the Civil War, of which it gave a good pictorial record, it had as many as 12 correspondents at the front.
The invention of photography and the development of the halftone block began to transform this type of magazine from the 1890s, with the artist increasingly being displaced by the camera.
Women's Magazines
Women’s magazines frequently reflect the changing view of women’s role in society. In the 18th century, when women were expected to participate in social and political life, those magazines aimed primarily at women were relatively robust and stimulating in content; in the 19th, when domesticity became the ideal, they were inclined to be insipid and humourless. After about 1880, magazines began to widen their horizons again.
Typical of the late Georgian and Regency magazines in Britain were The Lady’s Magazine (1770), a sixpenny monthly that, along with its literary contributions and fashion notes, gave away embroidery patterns and sheet music; The Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798), which had a half-yearly “Cabinet of Fashion” illustrated by coloured engravings, the first to appear in a women’s periodical; and La Belle Assemblée (1806), which encouraged its readers to unburden themselves in its correspondence columns. These three merged in 1832, the first instance of what was to become a common occurrence, but ceased publication in 1847. Later women’s magazines included The Ladies’ Pocket Magazine (1824–40), The Ladies’ Cabinet (1832–52), The New Monthly Belle Assemblée (1847–70), and The Ladies’ Treasury (1857–95). All contained verse, fiction, and articles of high moral tone but low intellectual content. There were attempts to swim against the tide, such as The Female’s Friend (1846), which was one of the first periodicals to espouse women’s rights, but they seldom lasted long.
In 1852 a wider market began to be tapped by The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, a monthly issued by Samuel Beeton at twopence instead of the usual one shilling; it was also the first women’s periodical to concentrate on home management and offer practical advice to women rather than provide entertainment for the idle. Beeton’s wife (author of the classic Book of Household Management, 1861) visited Paris regularly and acquired fashion plates from Adolphe Goubaud’s Moniteur de la Mode. A feature of Beeton’s magazine was the “Practical Dress Instructor,” a forerunner of the paper dressmaking pattern. In 1861, Beeton followed up his success with The Queen, a weekly newspaper of more topical character.
The great expansion of women’s magazines into a major industry may be dated in Britain from Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion (1875–1912) and Weldon’s Ladies’ Journal (1875–1954), both of which supplied dressmaking patterns and met the needs of a mass readership. Several new quality magazines were started, such as The Lady (founded 1885) and The Gentlewoman (1890–1926), one of the first to acknowledge the financial necessity of advertisements, but there were many more cheap weeklies, such as Home Notes (1894–1957), Home Chat (1895–1958), and Home Companion (1897–1956); these were of great help in teaching women about hygiene, nutrition, and child care.
Among the earliest women’s magazines in the United States was a monthly published in Philadelphia called Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830–98), which employed up to 150 women to hand-tint its fashion plates. Of the early national magazines, one of the best and hardiest was Harper’s Bazar (1867; Harper’s Bazaar after 1929), modeled on a Berlin women’s periodical, Der Bazar, from which it obtained its fashion material. The practical trend was begun in 1863 by Ebenezer Butterick, who devised the tissue-paper clothing pattern and, to popularize it, brought out the Ladies’ Quarterly Review of Broadway Fashions and, later, Metropolitan. These merged in 1873 into the Delineator, which had a highly successful career until 1937. The field of women’s magazines was finally transformed, however, by Cyrus Curtis with his Ladies’ Home Journal (founded 1883), edited by his wife, Louisa Knapp Curtis. This soon reached a circulation of 400,000 and, under the editorship of Edward W. Bok, from 1889, broke with sentimentality and piety to become a stimulating journal of real service to women. Other popular magazines were Ladies’ Home Companion (1886; called Woman’s Home Companion, 1897–1957), McCall’s Magazine (founded 1897), and Pictorial Review (1899–1939). Two requiring special mention were Good Housekeeping (founded 1885), which established a testing station for consumer goods early in the 20th century, and Vogue (founded 1892), a fashion weekly (later a monthly) dedicated to “the ceremonial side of life,” which was designed for the elite of New York City and had Cornelius Vanderbilt among its backers.
Literary and Scientific Magazines
The critical review developed strongly in the 19th century, often as an adjunct to a book-publishing business. It became a forum for the questions of the day—political, literary, and artistic—to which many great figures contributed. There were also many magazines with a literary flavour, and these serialized some of the best fiction of the period. A few marked the beginning of specialization—e.g., in science.
Britain was particularly rich in reviews, beginning with the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929), founded by a trio of gifted young critics: Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham, and Sydney Smith. The high and independent tone they adopted was said by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to mark an “epoch in periodical criticism.” Though Tories, including at first Sir Walter Scott, wrote for it, the Edinburgh Review gradually became increasingly Whig in attitude. Scott accordingly transferred his allegiance to the Quarterly Review (1809–1967), the Edinburgh Review’s Tory rival, founded by the London publisher John Murray and first edited by William Gifford. Gifford had previously edited The Anti-Jacobin (1797–98), with which such figures as the Tory statesman George Canning were associated. In opposition to these, and more political than any of them, was the Westminster Review (1824–1914), started by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill as an organ of the philosophical radicals. Two other early reviews were the Athenaeum (1828–1921), an independent literary weekly, and the Spectator (founded 1828), a nonpartisan but conservative-leaning political weekly that nonetheless supported parliamentary reform and the cause of the North in the American Civil War. Later reviews included the Saturday Review (1855–1938), which had George Bernard Shaw and Max Beerbohm as drama critics (1895–1910); the Fortnightly Review (1865–1954), which had the Liberal statesman John Morley as editor (1867–83); the Contemporary Review (founded 1866); the Nineteenth Century (1877; later the Twentieth Century, until it closed in 1974); and W.T. Stead’s Review of Reviews (1890–1936), a more limited version of Reader’s Digest.
Scholarly Journals
The publishing of scholarly journals, begun in the 17th century, expanded greatly in the 19th as fresh fields of inquiry opened up or old ones were further divided into specialties. Numerous learned societies were formed in such fields as classical studies, biblical studies, archaeology, philology, Egyptology, the Orient, and all the branches into which science was dividing, and each society published a regular bulletin, proceedings, or “transactions,” which enabled scholars to keep in touch with what others were doing. In the sober pages of these journals, seldom read by the general public, some of the most far-reaching discoveries were first made known. Among the many notable publications were Annali del Istituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica (1829), the Revue Archéologique (founded 1844), Philologus (1846), Mind (founded 1876), the Journal of Hellenic Studies (founded 1880), the American Journal of Philology (founded 1880), the Asiatic Quarterly (1886; later called South Asian Review), the Geographical Journal (1893), and an interesting informal aid to scholars, Notes and Queries (1849), with the motto: “When found, make a note of.” In every advanced country the professions too began to have journals, such as medicine’s Lancet (founded 1823), in Britain, originally started to attack abuses in hospital administration; the Mining Journal (founded 1835); the British Medical Journal (founded 1840); The Engineer (founded 1856); and the Solicitors’ Journal (founded 1857), to cite only a few examples. In the course of time, these developed endless technical ramifications. The economics of all such journals are based on necessity. Though their circulation is small, anyone working in a particular field generally subscribes to them or at least has access to them in appropriate libraries. They can be described as reference books in installments.
The 20th century
The advertising Revolution in Popular Magazines
There was a certain resistance to advertising in magazines, in keeping with their literary affinities. When the advertisement tax in Britain was repealed in 1853 and more advertising began to appear, the Athenaeum thought fit to say: “It is the duty of an independent journal to protect as far as possible the credulous, confiding and unwary from the wily arts of the insidious advertiser.” In the United States many magazines, such as Harper’s, took a high line with would-be advertisers until the 1880s; and Reader’s Digest, with its mammoth circulation, admitted advertisements to its American edition only in 1955. Yet today some sectors of the magazine industry are dominated by advertising, and few are wholly free from its influence.
Magazine Advertising Economics
In the United States Cyrus Curtis showed what could be achieved in attracting advertising revenue with the Saturday Evening Post. He bought the magazine for $1,000 in 1897, when it was on its last legs, and invested $1,250,000 of his profits from the Ladies’ Home Journal before it finally caught on. But when it did, through an appeal based on well-founded stories and articles about the business world, a prime interest at the time, its success was enormous; by 1922 it had a circulation of more than 2,000,000 and an advertising revenue in excess of $28,000,000. It was a classic demonstration of modern magazine economics: as circulation rose in the initial phase of low advertising rates, money had to be poured in to meet the cost of producing more copies; but, as soon as high advertising rates could be justified by a high circulation, profitability was assured. Conversely, when high rates are maintained on a falling circulation, it is the advertisers who lose, until they withdraw their support.
Once circulation figures became all-important, advertisers naturally asserted their right to verify them. The first attempt, made in 1899 by the Association of American Advertisers, only lasted until 1913, but fresh initiatives in 1914 created the Audit Bureau of Circulation. Though resented at first by publishers, it was eventually seen as a guarantee of their claims. Interest in circulation led publishers into market research. The first organization for this purpose was set up by the Curtis Publishing Company in 1911; but such research did not become general until the 1930s. Reader research, to ascertain what readers wanted from magazines, was also developed in the 1930s and proved to be a useful tool, though no substitute for editorial flair. As was once observed by the features editor of Vogue: “If we find out what people want, it’s already too late.”
Thus the popular magazine in the United States, expanding with the economy, became part of the marketing system. By 1900 advertisements might form up to 50 percent of its contents; by 1947, the proportion was more often 65 percent. A proprietor was no longer just selling attractive editorial matter to a segment of the public; he was also selling a well-charted segment of the public to the advertiser. Though the process was most pronounced in the United States, a vast country where, in the absence of national newspapers, national magazines had a special function, the same principles came to apply, in varying degrees, in Europe.
The effects of advertising on the appearance of the magazine have been, on the whole, stimulating. At the turn of the century, advertisements began to move forward from the back pages into greater prominence among the editorial matter, and this was often regretted by readers. At the same time, advertising agencies were developing from mere space sellers into copywriters and designers; their efforts to produce work of high visual appeal forced editors to make their own editorial typography and layout more attractive. The use of colour, in particular, was greatly fostered by advertisers once they discovered its effectiveness. In the 1880s colour printing was rare, but, after the development of the multicolour rotary press in the 1890s, it steadily became more common. By 1948 nearly half the advertising pages of the leading American magazines were in two or more colours.
The effect of advertising on editorial content is harder to analyze. Advertisers have not been slow to exercise financial pressure and have often succeeded in suppressing material or modifying policy. In 1940, for instance, Esquire lost its piano advertisements after publishing an article recommending the guitar for musical accompaniment; six months later it tried to win them back with a rueful editorial apology. Yet many magazines, notably the Saturday Evening Post, Time, and The New Yorker, have persistently asserted editorial independence. Something like a balance of power has come into being, which can tip either way. What can safely be said is that advertising pressure as a whole has been a socially conservative force, playing on conformity, inclining magazines to work on the principle of “minimum offense,” and holding them back from radical editorial departures until they are clearly indicated by changes in public taste. This has tended to make the large-circulation magazine an exploiter rather than a discoverer of fresh talent or new ideas. Yet in the last analysis, advertisers have been forced to recognize that magazines, like newspapers, cannot forgo too much of their independence without forfeiting the loyalty of their readers and hence their value as an advertising medium.
Advertising in Britain and Europe
Though the advertising revolution began in Britain at much the same time as in the United States, its course has been less explosive. By 1898, The Gentlewoman was pointing out in its first issue that every copy cost “nearly double the price for which it is sold.” Yet Britain’s Audit Bureau of Circulations was not set up until 1931, and membership remained small until the 1960s; for it was only then that consumer spending in Britain (and hence advertising) really began to soar, to be reflected in a boom in women’s magazines. In the early part of the century, the old general magazines continued to flourish, with such additions as the Windsor Magazine (1895–1939), Pearson’s Magazine (1896–1909), Argosy (founded 1926), which published only fiction, and the popular weekly John Bull (1906–64), which thrived on “revelations.” Several American magazines, especially women’s, began to come out in British editions, such as Vogue (1916), Good Housekeeping (1922), and Harper’s Bazaar (1929; in 1970 amalgamated with Queen as Harpers & Queen). Society periodicals lost ground after World War I to those catering to the so-called new poor and new rich, although snobbery still proved a lucrative element in magazine publishing, notably with the Tatler, which became highly successful under a new editor in the early 1980s. The fortnightly Queen, Woman’s Weekly (founded 1911), and the monthly Woman and Home (founded 1926) and Woman’s Journal (founded 1927) were joined by such popular weeklies as Woman’s Own (founded 1932), Woman’s Illustrated (1936–61), and, above all, Woman (founded 1937), the first to be printed by colourgravure. During World War II some of these magazines gave valuable practical advice on how to cope with shortages. In postwar Britain magazines began to be distributed through retail outlets—mostly supermarkets—other than bookshops or newsagents. The chief examples were Family Circle (founded 1964), an Anglo-American production, and its sister publication, Living (founded 1967). The trend toward youthful markets was indicated by She (founded 1955), broad and robust in outlook; Honey (founded 1960); Annabel (founded 1966), for younger married women in particular; Petticoat (1966–75), for girls 14 to 19 years old; and 19 (1968), a market leader. The death of many of the old general magazines, under the pressure of paperbacks and television, and the dearth of illustrated weeklies (see below Picture magazines) left room for a new advertising vehicle. The first to perceive this was Lord Thomson, who in 1962 brought out a colour magazine as supplement to the Sunday Times (London). Its eventual success forced the Observer and the Daily Telegraph to follow suit (the colour supplement was eventually removed from the latter paper and issued instead with its sister publication, the Sunday Telegraph). In the early 1980s the popular Sunday papers also started supplements.
In the rest of Europe the impact of advertising on magazines has been more delayed and less pronounced, partly because market prices of continental magazines tend to be closer to the production cost. General magazines were fairly limited before World War II, but since then, as part of the economic expansion, there has been a rich crop, including many newsmagazines similar to Time and Life and also a number of magazines for women. France has several of the latter with large circulations, including Nous Deux, Elle, and Intimité, while those in Germany include entries for all age groups, such as Jasmin for newlyweds and Eltern for parents. Though the northern European countries have fewer periodicals, it is worth noting that in Finland Pirkka, a giveaway distributed through grocery stores, achieved one of the largest magazine circulations.
News and Photo Magazines
The accelerated tempo of life in the 20th century, coupled with the bewildering amount of information appearing in print, suggested the need for more concise ways of presenting it. The first to show how it could be done and so give rise to a whole new class of periodical was the U.S. newsmagazine Time, founded in 1923 by Briton Hadden and Henry Luce.
Time Magazine
There had, of course, been newsmagazines before, in both Europe and the United States. Time magazine’s immediate forerunner was the Pathfinder (1894–1954), a weekly rewriting of the news for rural readers. There had also been attempts at compression of the digest type (see below Digests and pocket magazines). But Time was the first to aim at a brief and systematic presentation of the whole of the world’s news. It was based on the proposition that “people are uninformed because no publication has adapted itself to the time which busy men are able to spend simply keeping informed.” Its beginning was amateurish and precarious; neither Hadden nor Luce had much experience when they started summarizing the news from bundles of daily papers (copyright provisions on newspapers allowing this use). But after 1928 it grew steadily, finding its market chiefly among the rising number of college graduates. What came to be known as the Time style was characterized, in the words of a later critic, by two great democratic ideals, disrespect for authority and reverence for success. Time presented the news in tightly packed sentences, well researched and checked, and with a general air of omniscience. In the 1930s, to ensure adequate sources of information, Time Inc. built up a large news-gathering organization of its own. It also branched out into other publications, including Fortune (founded 1930), summarizing business news, Life (see below), and People, a weekly begun in 1974.
Picture Magazines
Conciseness can also be achieved through pictures, which obviate the need for description. Illustrated newsmagazines began in the 19th century, but they took an altogether new form as photography developed. The most influential, though by no means the first of the modern type, was undoubtedly the American weekly Life (1936–72), started by Henry Luce.
Pictorial journalism grew up alongside advertising techniques, the tabloid, and the documentary film. Modern cameras enabled top-grade photographs to be taken quickly under almost any conditions. Photojournalists were particularly active in Germany, until many had to flee the Nazis. One of them was the Hungarian Stefan Lorant, who developed the photo essay (a story reported through pictures) with Bilder Courier in Berlin in 1926 and with the Münchener illustrierte Presse in the period 1927–33. He then went to Britain, where he started a pocket picture magazine, Lilliput (1937–60), and was the first editor of Picture Post (1938–57). Another pioneer was a German, Erich Salomon, who became celebrated for his photographs of the famous, particularly politicians, in unguarded moments. Salomon’s pictures in the London Tatler in 1928 prompted Fortune to invite him to the United States, where he inspired the Life photographer Thomas McAvoy.
In November 1936, therefore, when Life first appeared, picture magazines were already fairly common. Only a month before, Mid-Week Pictorial (1914–37), an American weekly of news pictures, had been restyled along the lines Life was to take, but Life quickly overwhelmed it. Though expected to have a circulation of well under 500,000 copies, Life was running at 1,000,000 within weeks. Its first issue, 96 large pages of pictures on glossy paper for 10 cents, was a sellout, the opening picture brilliant: an obstetrician holding a newborn baby, with the caption “Life begins.” Over the years, it kept the promise of its prospectus: “To see life; to see the world; to witness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things. . . .” During World War II, which it covered with great accomplishment, it enlarged its operations with a fortnightly international edition, and in 1952 a Spanish-language edition was added for Latin America, Life en Español. In 1971 Life magazine’s circulation was about 7,000,000, but its high costs were no longer being met by advertising income, and it ceased publication in December 1972; it was revived as a monthly in October 1978.
Digests and Pocket Magazines
Readers Digest
The need for concise reading matter, so well met by Time and Life, was met even more successfully, in terms of circulation, by an American magazine that reprinted in condensed form articles from other periodicals. This was the pocket-size Reader’s Digest, founded in 1922 by DeWitt Wallace.
Its forerunners in the United States were the Literary Digest (1890–1938), started by two former Lutheran ministers, Isaac K. Funk and Adam W. Wagnalls; the Review of Reviews (1890–1937), founded by Albert Shaw to condense material about world affairs; and Frank Munsey’s Scrap Book (1906–12), “a granary for the gleanings of literature.” The Literary Digest, in particular, with a circulation of more than 1,000,000 in the early 1920s, was something of an American institution. Its famous straw votes successfully predicted the result of the presidential elections after 1920, and its highly publicized wrong prediction of the outcome of the 1936 election played a decisive part in its collapse. Reader’s Digest, however, was more specific in content and more universal in appeal. It aimed to supply “An article a day from leading magazines in condensed, permanent, booklet form.” Each article, moreover, satisfied three criteria: “applicability” (it had to be of concern to the average reader); “lasting interest” (it had to be readable a year later); and “constructiveness” (it had to be on the side of optimism and good works).
After three years’ preparation, Wallace began to produce the magazine (first issue February 1922) from a basement office in New York City. After a year, subscriptions were running at about 7,000. In 1939, when circulation had reached 3,000,000, Reader’s Digest moved into large premises at nearby Chappaqua. Until 1930 it was produced entirely by amateurs. Condensed books began to be added at the end of the magazine in 1934, and from this grew the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club, with 2,500,000 members four years later. Overseas editions were started in 1939 (British), and foreign-language editions in 1940 (Spanish), others being steadily added over the following 10 years. In the late 1980s, Reader’s Digest had one of the largest circulations of any magazine in the world.
Specialised Magazines
Though general magazines have the largest circulations, most magazines cater to specialist interests or pursuits. Circulation varies, but, even where it is small, it is usually stable over the short term and offers an advertiser a well-defined market. Such magazines may be broadly classified into professional (including trade and technical) and nonprofessional journals.
Professional Types
The professional magazine, often the organ of an association, keeps members informed of the latest developments, helps them to maintain standards, and defends their interests. Some were started in the 19th century, but specialization and different viewpoints within specialties have encouraged proliferation. Instead of two or three medical journals, for instance, there are now likely to be dozens, besides those in specialized areas such as dentistry, ophthalmology, and psychiatry. Though most of these magazines are of little interest to the general public, a few print authoritative articles of broader scope.
Trade and technical journals serve those working in industry and commerce. They too have grown enormously in numbers. Major discoveries in science, manufacturing methods, or business practice tend to create a new subdivision of technology, with its own practitioners and, more often than not, its own magazine. Articles in these magazines tend to be highly factual and accurately written, by people deeply immersed in their subjects. Most are well produced, often on art paper for the sake of the illustrations, and heavily dependent on advertising. Indeed, many are issued for a controlled circulation; i.e., a publisher undertakes to distribute a magazine free of charge to a given number of specialist concerns, which can be relied upon to want a certain range of products. The manufacturers of these products, for their part, are naturally glad to have an advertising medium guaranteed to reach their particular market. The business papers may lack glamour, but they play a vital and highly influential part in economic life.
Non-Professional Types
Of the nonprofessional magazines, quite a number serve broad interest groups, religious, political, or social. Most religious denominations have journals, often more than one. Though some of these magazines are subsidized as part of a drive to spread their message, most of them merely aim to foster corporate feeling among coreligionists. Much the same applies to political magazines in the narrow sense—i.e., where they are issued by political organizations: they discuss doctrine, give news of activities, and forge links among members. Political discussion on less partisan matters and in a less partisan tone tends to take place in more general magazines. Certain periodicals spring from the needs of particular groups, an example being student magazines.
Specialized magazines for the layman may fall into the hobby category. Very often a professional magazine has an amateur counterpart, as, for instance, in electronics, where the amateur finds a wide range of technical magazines on radio, television, hi-fi, and tape recording. Other popular subjects are photography (the British Amateur Photographer was founded in 1884) and motoring (Hearst’s Motor was founded, as Motor Cycling and Motoring, in 1902); specialization even extends to types of camera and makes of car. Virtually no hobby or sport is without its magazine. As soon as any activity becomes sufficiently popular, a magazine appears to cater to its adherents and to provide an advertising medium, not only for manufacturers and suppliers but also for readers, to help them buy and sell secondhand equipment, for instance.
Some special tastes in entertainment are met by the “pulp” and “comic” magazines. In 1896 Frank Munsey turned his Argosy into an all-fiction magazine using rough wood-pulp paper. The “dime novel” did not qualify for inexpensive postal rates in the United States, but the pulp magazine did, and so an industry was born. Pulps began as adventure magazines but soon split up into further categories: love, detective, and western. Such magazines sold in the millions up to the mid-1930s, when they gradually lost ground to the comics. These began as collections reprinted from the comic strips in newspapers; the first to appear regularly was Famous Funnies (1934). After 1937, however, with Detective Comics, they came into their own as original publications, and, like the pulps, they grew into a major industry, dividing up into much the same types. They may be seen, in effect, as pictorial condensations of the pulps. Though mainly for children, they were widely read by adults. “Comic” rapidly became a misnomer, as they played increasingly on horror and violence. While some defended them as harmless and even cathartic, others condemned them as incitements to imitation. Attempts at control were made through legislation in the United States and elsewhere, and the industry itself tried to set standards. Television has since drawn much of the criticism, and the demand, to itself, but comics remain big business. One type of magazine, originally classed as pulp but attaining with the years a certain respectability, is the science-fiction magazine, the first example of which was Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, first published in 1926.
The “fan” magazines offer glimpses of life behind the scenes in the world of entertainment and sport. In the heyday of motion pictures, many magazines on films and their stars appeared, beginning with Photoplay (1911–77) and Picture Play (1915) and later others, such as Movie Mirror (1930) and Movieland (1942). When radio and television became popular, similar magazines sprang up centring on programs and their personalities. One of their functions was to provide a weekly timetable of programs.
Finally, there are a number of “special service” magazines—e.g., financial magazines to help the private investor, magazines of advice issued by consumer associations, magazines specifically for house hunters, racegoers, or for trading in secondhand goods, and so on.
Britain
Many of the British reviews founded in the 19th century have continued to flourish. Among additions of the scholarly type were the Hibbert Journal (1902–70), a nonsectarian quarterly for the discussion of religion, philosophy, sociology, and the arts; the Times Literary Supplement (founded 1902), important for the completeness of its coverage of all aspects of books and bibliographical matters; International Affairs (founded 1922), the journal of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs; and The Political Quarterly (founded 1930), for the discussion of social and political questions from a progressive but nonparty point of view. Of the weekly political reviews, the Spectator (founded 1828), was representative of the right, and the New Statesman (founded 1913), founded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, of the left, though both in a broad context; while Time and Tide(1920–79), originally founded by Lady Rhondda as an independent journal, was an influential newsmagazine. Several other periodicals met the need for serious articles on current questions; among them are The Economist (founded 1843); The Listener (founded 1929), published by the British Broadcasting Corporation and consisting mainly of radio talks in printed form; the New Scientist (founded 1956), drawing attention to current scientific work; and New Society (founded 1962), concentrating on sociology. Literary magazines came and went, but not without leaving their mark. They included the Egoist (1914–19), associated with Ezra Pound and the Imagists; the London Mercury (1919–39), started by J.C. (later Sir John) Squire, one of the Georgian poets; the Criterion (1922–39), founded and edited by T.S. Eliot; the Adelphi (1923–55), of John Middleton Murry; New Writing (1936–46), edited by John Lehmann, who also later revived the old London Magazine (from 1954); and Horizon (1940–50; revived 1958), which Cyril Connolly started as a medium for literature during the war years. Later, Encounter (founded 1953), an international review originally sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, proved to be an intellectual magazine of value and distinction. In addition, many “little magazines” have struggled along, as always, providing essential seedbeds for new writers.
USA
American counterparts to British scholarly journals include the Political Science Quarterly (founded 1886), edited by the political science faculty of Columbia University; the American Scholar (founded 1932), “a quarterly for the independent thinker” edited by the united chapters of Phi Beta Kappa; Foreign Affairs (founded 1922), a quarterly dealing with the international aspects of America’s political and economic problems; and Arts in Society (founded 1958), a forum for the discussion of the role of art, which also publishes poetry and reviews. Of general political journals, the oldest still in publication in the 1990s was The Nation, founded in 1865 by E.L. Godkin and edited in the period 1918–34 by Oswald Garrison Villard. By tradition it adopted a critical stand on most matters, disdaining approval by the majority; it was notable for the “casual brilliance” of its literary reviews. When the muckraking phase in the popular magazines died down, zeal for reform was left to a succession of little magazines that led precarious lives, often needing extra support from loyal readers or rich individuals. Such were the Progressive (founded 1909), of the La Follette family; The Masses (1911–17), run by the Greenwich Village Socialists; and The New Republic (founded 1914), which was started by Herbert Croly with the backing of the Straight family as “frankly an experiment” and “a journal of opinion to meet the challenge of the new time” and which survived as a liberal organ after many triumphs and vicissitudes. Between the wars came the Marxist Liberator (1918–24); the Freeman (1920–24 and 1950–54), founded to recommend the single-tax principle of Henry George and later revived as a Republican journal; the New Leader (founded 1927), for 10 years the organ of the American Socialist Party; and the extreme left New Masses (1926–48). Postwar foundations included the anticommunist Plain Talk (1946–50); the fortnightly Reporter (1949–68), strong on “facts and ideas”; and the conservative National Review (founded 1955). Of the literary magazines, the Atlantic and Harper’s were joined by the American Mercury (founded 1924), which had a brilliant initial period under H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, when it published work by many distinguished writers of the time; and the Saturday Review (founded 1924), which began as a purely literary magazine but broadened its scope in the 1940s. In 1972 a new ownership brought more changes. A powerful influence on American writing has been exerted by The New Yorker (founded 1925), mainly through its founder Harold Ross, a perfectionist among editors. It became famous for its cartoons and biographical studies. Finally, there has been no lack of “little magazines” to foster talent.
Europe
Among the numerous literary magazines in Europe, several in France and Germany in particular may be mentioned. The Mercure de France was revived in 1890 as an organ of the Symbolists; the influential Nouvelle Revue Française (1909) aimed at a fresh examination of literary and intellectual values; and the Nouvelles Littéraires (1922) was founded by André Gillon as a weekly of information, criticism, and bibliography. After World War II there appeared Jean-Paul Sartre’s left-wing monthly Les Temps Modernes (founded 1945), La Table Ronde (1948), and Les Lettres Nouvelles (1953). In Germany, political magazines included the radical Die Fackel (1899; “The Torch”) and Die neue Gesellschaft (1903–07; “The New Society”) of the Social Democrats. An important literary influence was Blätter für die Kunst, associated with the Neoromantic movement of Stefan George. The Nazi period imposed a break in development, but after World War II the liberal weekly Die Zeit and a number of literary journals, such as Westermanns Monatshefte, Neue deutsche Hefte, and Akzente, appeared.
The political involvement of the literary review was especially marked in the Soviet Union and Soviet-bloc countries. The Literaturnaya Gazeta (founded 1929) and the influential Novy Mir (founded 1925; “New World”) often became the centre of controversy in the Soviet Union when writers were condemned for their views or denied the opportunity to publish. This led to a strong underground press. In Czechoslovakia the Literárne Listy played a prominent part in the freedom movement of 1968 and was later suppressed at Soviet insistence, along with the Reportér and Student, leading to the start of several underground magazines. Sinn und Form (founded 1949), a Marxist critical journal in Berlin, was subject to temporary suspensions for publishing such authors as Sartre, Kafka, and Hemingway, whose works had been banned in East Germany.
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