Vol. I. MARCH, 1906. No. 1.
Something New in Magazine Making.
THE SCRAP BOOK will be the most elastic thing that ever happened, in the
way of a magazine--elastic enough to carry anything from a tin whistle to
a battle-ship. This elasticity is just what we should have in
magazine-making, but it is precisely what we do not have and cannot have
in the conventional magazine, such, for example, as _The Century_,
_Harper's_, MUNSEY'S, and _McClure's_.
A certain standard has grown up for these magazines that gives the editor
comparatively little latitude. Custom has decreed that they shall carry
nothing but original matter, and that it shall be dignified and
tremendously magaziny--so magaziny, in fact, that often it is as juiceless
as a dried lemon.
To republish, in successive issues of a magazine of this type, a
considerable proportion of the gems of the past, or the best things
printed in current publications, or to swing away recklessly from
convention in the illustrations and make-up, would be to switch the
magazine out of its class and into some other which the public would not
accept as standard.
In THE SCRAP BOOK we shall be bounded by no such restrictions, no
restrictions of any kind that come within the scope of good journalism.
With our average of two hundred pages of reading matter, we shall carry
the biggest cargo of real, human-interest reading matter that has ever
been carried by any magazine in the wide world.
In size alone it will be from forty to eighty pages larger than the
standard magazines, and by reason of the fact that its space is not taken
up by illustrations, and that we use a smaller, though perfectly distinct
type, the number of words in THE SCRAP BOOK will be a good deal more than
double that contained in these other magazines.
With such a vast amount and such a wide variety of reading, there is
something in THE SCRAP BOOK for every human being who knows how to read
and cares at all to read. Everything that appeals to the human brain and
human heart will come within the compass of THE SCRAP BOOK--fiction, which
is the backbone of periodical circulation; biography, review, philosophy,
science, art, poetry, wit, humor, pathos, satire, the weird, the
mystical--everything that can be classified and everything that cannot be
classified. A paragraph, a little bit, a saying, an editorial, a joke, a
maxim, an epigram--all these will be comprised in the monthly budget of
THE SCRAP BOOK. We are starting off with four good serial stories, and
next month another will be added, and then another, so that we can
maintain an average of six.
There isn't anything in the world just like THE SCRAP BOOK--nothing, in
fact, that compares with it at all. There are review magazines, and small
weekly reviews, and there are, or have been, eclectic magazines; but never
before has anything been attempted on the scale and magnitude of this
magazine. It is an idea on which we have been working for several years,
and for which we have been gathering materials. We have bought hundreds
and hundreds of scrap books from all over the country, some of them a
century old, and are still buying them. From these books we are gathering
and classifying an enormous number of gems, and facts and figures, and
historical and personal bits that are of rare value.
Furthermore, we have a corps of people ransacking libraries, reading all
the current publications, the leading daily papers, and digging out
curious and quaint facts and useful facts and figures from reference
books, cyclopedias, etc., etc.
This first number is but the beginning of what we have in mind for THE
SCRAP BOOK. It is so voluminous in the number of its words, and so varied
in its subjects, that in arrangement and matter it necessarily falls short
of the perfected magazine at which we are aiming. Our purpose, in a word,
is to give more first-rate reading, on a wide variety of subjects, for our
great big eighty millions of people than has ever before been presented in
any single periodical, and to give this magazine at the people's
price--the nimble dime.