For easier understanding by you whose magazine memories do not go back
to the turn of the century it should be told that we were then carrying
a Gibson Girl hangover from the Gay Nineties and were but a few years
removed from a time when there were only three standard monthlies:
_Harper’s_, _Scribner’s_, and _Century_; and seven illustrated
weeklies: _Harper’s_, _Frank Leslie’s_, _Harper’s Bazaar_, _Police
Gazette_, _Puck_, _Judge_ and the old _Life_,--magazines and weeklies
that were seldom given display other than in hotels and railroad
depots, where they were shown in competition with the then-popular
paper-covered novels.
In the mid-Eighties all monthlies, weeklies, books and booklets were
hand-fed, folded, collated and bound; halftones were in an experimental
stage; advertising agencies, if any existed, were not noticeable in
Chicago, and advertising of a national character used only quarter-page
cover space. But something in the air already quickened imagination,
and the Nineties gave us more magazines and better display.
In 1907, magazines were shedding swaddling clothes and getting into
rompers; the _Saturday Evening Post_ had cast off its pseudo-Benjamin
Franklin dress and adopted a live editorial policy that was winning
readers and advertising; Edward Bok had ventured a Harrison Fisher
head on a _Ladies’ Home Journal_ cover and won a fifty-thousand gain
in newsstand sales, and Robert Collier had built a subscription-book
premium into a national weekly.
[Illustration]