"All editors write, or have written; therefore little excuse exists for any of them to become tactless, hard, or insolent when the editorial chair is gained." — Helen Churchill Hungerford Candee, in her 1900 book "How Women May Earn a Living." Presumably toughened by her own dealings with editors, Candee went on to survive the Titanic disaster one hundred years ago this week (April 14-15, 1912). She died in 1949.
| | | |
| | |
In honor of Leap Day, a link to a web site devoted to the topic, and its collection of old magazines with a Leap Year theme.
| | | |
| | |
Time magazine's two founders, Briton Hadden and Henry Luce, died on February 27 and February 28 respectively, Hadden in 1929, Luce in 1967.
Hadden had celebrated his 31st birthday a little over a week before his death, the exact cause of which remains a mystery but seems to have involved some sort of infection.
Hadden's short life has been the subject of two biographies: a 1949 one by his cousin, the writer Noel F. Busch, and 2006's "The Man Time Forgot," by Isaiah Wilner.
Henry Luce, meanwhile, lived on to create Fortune, Life, and Sports Illustrated, among other magazines. He was 68 at his death. Luce is the subject of numerous biographies, among them, 2010's "The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century," by Alan Brinkley.
| | | |
| | |
George Washington, whose birth in 1732 we celebrate on February 22, reportedly said this about magazines in a 1788 letter:
"I consider such easy vehicles of knowledge more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry, and meliorate the morals of an enlightened free people."
Two centuries later, Washington would be the namesake of John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s magazine, George.
| | | |
| | |
Cartooonist Thomas Nast's first cover drawing of Santa Claus appeared on the January 3, 1863 issue of Harper's Weekly. In it, the jolly old elf is seen bestowing gifts on Union troops, while dressed in what appears to be the stars and stripes. Nast is credited with creating the familiar image of Santa Claus that lives on to this day.
| | | |
| | |
O. Henry, one the most famous magazine bylines of the early 20th century, first appeared over a short story in McClure’s magazine called “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking.” As readers would eventually learn, “Henry” was actually William Sydney Porter, a convicted embezzler doing time at the Federal pen in Columbus, Ohio, and sending out stories under a variety of pseudonyms. With the 1898 McClure’s sale, O. Henry became the one that stuck. Porter went on to write other Christmas tales, including his most famous, “The Gift of the Magi.” Incidentally, Porter was briefly the editor and owner of a weekly humor publication called The Rolling Stone.
| | | |
| | |
The character played by Barbara Stanwyck in the movie "Christmas in Connecticut" (1945) is said to have been loosely based on Gladys Taber, a well-known columnist for Ladies' Home Journal and Family Circle from the 1930s through the 1960s. In the movie, Stanwyck's character works for a magazine called Smart Housekeeping.
| | | |
| | |
Starting in 1939, the eccentric but hugely successful magazine entrepreneur Bernarr Macfadden (Liberty, True Story, Physical Culture, and many others) proposed the creation of what he called "America's Night of Light." In newspaper guest editorials and full-page ads, he urged that "we light every lamp in America on Christmas Eve as America's answer to the blackout just beginning abroad." Macfadden continued to push the idea in 1940 but seems to have dropped it the following Christmas, when the December 7 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. officially into the war as well.
| | | |
| | |
Much of the material that would go into "A Christmas Story," the classic 1983 film based on the fanciful reminiscences of radio humorist Jean Shepherd, first appeared in Playboy magazine in the 1960s.
| | | |
| | |
Thanksgiving might not be a national holiday but for the efforts of Sarah Josepha Hale (1788 to 1879), longtime editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, who persuaded Abraham Lincoln to back it. The old New England tradition became an official, coast-to-coast overeating orgy in 1863. When she was not editing magazines or lobbying Presidents, Hale was also a poet, novelist, and author of the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
| | | |
| | |
Today (October 12) is the anniversary of the first official recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, which made its debut in 1892, the result of an editorial crusade by the Boston-based magazine The Youth's Companion.
Though little remembered today, The Youth's Companion lasted a remarkable 102 years (1827 to 1929), and some of its DNA lived on for another 12 in the American Boy, which absorbed it.
The great magazine historian Frank Luther Mott noted that one reason for the magazine's longevity was that it smartly avoided the fatal flaw of many children's magazines—that kids subscribe for only a few years before aging out— by making its contents appeal to the whole family. Among its prominent contributors, for example, was Jack London, whose famous story "To Build a Fire" appeared there in 1902.
| | | |
| | |
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Bicycling magazine. Though that's a proud achievement for any title, especialy these days, magazines about bicycling go back to the mid-19th century. According to the magazine historian Frank Luther Mott, the earliest of them seeems to have been the Velocipedist, which started rolling in 1869. A trade magazine called American Bicycling Journal followed within a decade, Mott writes. Another early entry was the interestingly titled Bicycling World and the Archery Field.
| | | |
| | |
