under
construction
Magazines:
Overview of Magazines in 20th Century
Right from America's
beginnings -- in the seventeenth
century -- magazines served as important outlets for the
transmission of a wide range of politicial and social ideas (and
ideals), on how to do almost anything, or, on
promoting inventions and many other things.
Curiously,
though, for reasons not clear to me, studies that
assess the
impact of magazines are rare. I cite the few that I located below,
in Sources.
During the
twentieth, magazines were a "growth
industry", for sure, for many titles -- especially general purpose
magazines -- in number of
suscriptions, reached the million mark and more.
The impact of
a handful of historical events,
though, created interruptions in the steadiness of magazines'
growth.
Four
events, in particular, stand out as periods that show drops
in magazine circulation.
The first
time: after World War I, for all classes of people
-- instead of a
novelty for the well-to-do --, automobiles
became vehicles for both business and pleasure.
The second:
in the
mid-twenties, when radio aerials
sprouted from housetops across the country and stations scrambled to
affiliate
with national networks, readership of magazines dropped.
The third:
later in the same decade, movies captured America's
attention, and --
it is said -- reduced readership of magazines.
But, the
fourth -- the crowning blow
for many magazines, especially those general purpose magazines like American
Magazine, Collier's, The
Staturday Evening Post, and even Life,
suffered death blows -- the emergence of television in the
post World War II era.
Despite
such setbacks, pessimistic forecasts from
time to time, however,
magazines --especially those targeting narrow intererst groups --
enjoyed a remarkable growth. In numbers, readers of
magazines increased
exponentially. In
1893, when he started Munsey's Magazine,
Frank
Munsey estimated, there were about 250,000 magazine purchasers
in the United States.
By 1899, purchasers for his magazine, he estimated,
had increased to
750,000. In 1947, in a nationwide study of magazine reading
families —those in which
members could
identify specific items from recent issues -- the Magazine
Advertising
Bureau found a breath-taking 32,300,000 readership.
And two decades later, In 1959, a study for the
Magazine
Advertising Bureau and the Magazine Publishers Association
found that 41,492,000 households — or, over 80% of
America's total familes — made up the magazine
market.
Throughout,
the numbers of individual magazines increased, to a point, where,
Theodore Peterson claims, "there
were probably well over a thousand more magazines in the United States
in 1963
than in 1900".
The aggregate
circulation of all magazines in the nation mounted
steadily, and the sales of individual publications soared from
thousands to
millions. In 1900 probably just one magazine, Comfort,
could boast a circulation of a
million copies an issue; in 1963, at least fifty general and farm
magazines had
circulations of 1,000,000 or more, and one, Life,
sold more than
14,500,000 copies of its issues in America.
The table
below, adapted from Peterson, shows data in the aggregate of magazine
circulation -- from 1900 to 1958:
The
table below, adapted from Peterson, from 1929 to 1962, shows
the growth of magazines from
three perspectives: number of magazines published in a given year;
average circulation per year in thousands; and copies of magzines sold
annualy (again in thousands):
Peterson
argues that two main reasons explain this remarkable
growth:
a
growing demand for advertisers' goods
and services,
and a growing demand
for the publishers' own products, magazines. The magazine industry
shared in
the expansion of the American economy as a whole in the twentieth
century, just
as did manufacturers of automobiles, refrigerators, and dentifrices,
and such
other communications media as newspapers and broadcasting.
Under
a system of advertising support, in which the
publisher performed a marketing function, the fortunes of the magazine
industry
came to depend closely upon the health of the economy in general. When
the
national magazine emerged in the late nineteenth century, the magazine
publisher became a dealer in consumer groups as well as a dealer in
editorial
matter. He decided upon a group of consumers which advertisers wanted
to reach,
and he attracted the consumers to his magazine with a carefully planned
editorial formula. Just as often, perhaps, he issued his publication
and let it
find its audience. Then he sold advertisers space in his magazine to
tell their
sales stories to the readers he collected. Selling his magazine for
less than
production cost, he took his profits from advertising.
Source:
Theodore Peterson's Magazines
in the Twenteith Century Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1964, second ed.
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The
following summarizes Theodore Peterson's scholarly assessment of the
impact of magazines in the twentieth century upon American life and
culture. For the complete account, see chapter 15
of Peterson's Magazines in the Twentieth Century
First, says Peterson, magazines
are in large measure responsible for the social and political
reforms made during the century.
Second, in their
interpretations of issues and events, magazinesput
them in national perspective.
Third, the national viewpoint of magazines helped
foster a sense of national community.
Fourth, magazines provided millions of Americans with
low-cost entertainment.
Fifth, the
magazine,
for Americans, served as an inexpensive instructor in daily
living, by counseling on child rearing, on managing
marital
and financial problems, or simply getting along with one
another.
More
closely focusing on the topic at hand, the amateur woodworking
movement, though, Peterson maintains that "magazines told
Americans how to furnish and decorate their homes ... [and
i]t
instructed readers in making lamps and bookcases and chairs and tables
and even the homes in which to put them".
Sixth,
magazines were an educator in man's cultural heritage. With their
historical articles, they explored the nation's past; with their
biographical articles, they recalled the men who had shaped it. They
acquainted Americans with the accomplishments of other peoples. They
introduced them to the best in architecture, painting, sculpture, and
thought.
Seventh, one of the strengths of magazines was
their variety, in entertainment, information, and ideas.
This variety, Peterson argues, comes from editors selecting a
specific audience. Some magazines, for sure, built
circulations in the millions by appealing to audiences of highly
diversified tastes and interests. Typically, though, individual
magazines had a narrower focus of "their" audience: it was
edited
for a following with a mutual activity or outlook.
Wide
Circulation of Craft
Magazines in the 1901 -- 1910 Decade --
"Americans
were subscribing to dozens
of periodicals devoted to Arts and Crafts concerns" is how the
material culture scholar, Wendy Kaplan characterizes
conditions
concerning magazine circulation in the first decade of the twentieth
century.
Continues Kaplan, "Mass communication played an essential role in the
transmission of style at the turn of the century."
The advent of cheaper
printing techniques and especially the development of the halftone
(which substantially
reduced the cost of illustrations) created a vast new audience for
magzines.
Art journals such as Studio and Brush
and Pencil -- or more general
magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal
-- were sources ideas for architects and for craftsmen, or --
perhaps even more important -- as arbiters of taste for
middle-class consumers. New "shelter" magazines, especially House
and Garden and
House Beautiful, quickly became "tastemakers". (In
its own words, House Beautiful
was the "only magazine in America
devoted
to Simplicity, Economy, and Appropriateness in the home".) Bungalow
Magazine played an important role in
promoting the Arts and Crafts
ideals.
Precise Circulation Data Lacking
Regretfully,
we lack "smoking-gun" empirical evidence about this alleged
"wide
circulation" of periodicals of this period. As evidence for
her
claim, Kaplan cites a page in Frank Luther Mott's, A
History of American Magazines,
vol.
4 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), page 3, but even that
classic work provides data about numbers of
subscriptions for
the limited number of magzines Mott treats, and none of these
titles focus directly upon the Arts and Crafts movement nor on
woodworking as a hobby. A source with more details -- but in the
aggregate, with no mention of subscription
numbers
for individual titles of any magazine -- is
Theodore
Peterson's Magazines in the Twenteith Century (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1964, second ed.)
Popular Science
and Popular Mechanics ..
According to
Theodore Peterson (in Magazines in the Twentieth
Century) Popular
Mechanics started its life in January, 1902, with
the subtitle: An
Illustrated Weekly Review of the Mechanical Press of The World.
That title lasted until May 1913. Then, the title was changed
to Popular
Mechanics Magazine,
a title the title used until, July 1959, after the take-over
by the
Hearst Publishing Corporation, when the title became simply, Popular
Mechanics.
The
beginnings of Popular
Mechanics, Peterson says, were not very
promising: a skimpy
weekly, it "... went to five subscribers and a few hundred
curious
readers who paid their nickels for copies at the newsstand".
Founded by an Iowa minister's son, Henry Haven
Windsor, Sr., 1902-1924; Popular Mechanics,
from the beginning, was
intended as a forum for interpreting science and mechanics for the
average man. Windsor's son assumed editorship in 1924, and remained
until 1958, at which time Popular
Mechanics was
sold to the Hearst Publishing Corporation, where it remains. Its
current publication rate numbers almost 2,000,000 copies per issue.
(Today, amateur woodworkers know the senior Windsor through the Dover
Publication or reprints of articles published in Popular
Mechanics, in 1909, 1910, and 1912: Mission
Furniture: How to Make It. Popular
Mechanics ShopNotes
have also made a
contemporary impact. )
With
only a little background in publishing, Windsor "wrote every word of
copy and sold every advertisement which appeared in the first issue.
His only help was a bookkeeper and a mail clerk, and neither had enough
work to keep busy for several months". Their perseverance worked,
though, for by September, 1903, Popular
Mechanics
succeeded to a point where it could be transformed a
sixteen-page
weekly into a hundred-page monthly. (It soon became
a 300-pages-a-month operation.) Early on, Windsor
fixed upon the editorial
pattern: a section of news and general features about science and
technology, a section for shop mechanics, and a section of how-to-do-it
articles for the home craftsman.
Popular
Science back into the 1870s. Initially, the contents of Popular
Science was that, a
popularization of science, especially the voguish Darwinianism of the
day, i.e., Herbert Spencer's "social Darwinism". Throughout these first
decades, ownership changed several times, until 1915, when Henry J.
Fisher, Robert Cade Wilson, and
Oliver Capen bought the magazine, merging it with World
Advance. From that point, Popular
Science "came home", so to speak, seeking out a new
audience, the home
craftsman and hobbyist who wanted to know something about the world of
science.
To capitalize
on the increased interest in science
and technology stemming out of during World War II, through
text and photographs, Popular
Science increased its coverage
of science
and technology and put its
how-to-do-it material in its back pages. Shortly after the end of the
war, it was reaching more than a million readers each issue; in 1963 it
had a circulation of 1,287,000.
To amateur woodworkers, the
significant era of Popular
Science
is that period in which the section, "The Homeworkshop", was
edited by Arthur Wakeling. While I haven't nailed down the exact dates,
they definitely fall between 1928 and 1938, but give or take
a
few years before and after those years. This era is significant to
amateur woodworking because of the publication in 1930 of The Home
Workshop Manual, and the companion volume, Things to
Make in Yor Home Workshop. And, in Popular
Science, December, 1933, Wakeling announced the
launching of the National Homeworkshop Guild. See Woodworker's Manuals #9: Arthur
Wakeling and the Formation of the National
Homeworkshop Guild in the 1930s
The
Craftsman and The Artsman
...
Gustav
Stickley's The Craftsman (1901
- 1916) is recognized as one
of the
most successful journals to popularize the philosophy of the Arts and
Crafts movement.
According to
Kaplan, we should view The Craftsman as
having two stages. The earliest
issues of The Craftsman show a
Stickley in an idealistic mode, promoting the ideas and ideals
of
William Morris. Later, Stickley's reformist zeal declined, articles in
the craftsman that focus on hand-craftsmanship
promote
individual
fulfillment more than arguing for altering political and
social
institutions.
(In the 1980s, at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts,
Kaplan organized a
large exhibit on Arts and Crafts -- cited below -- and for posterity,
published photos and other illustrations in a book about the
exhibit. The collection was also exhibited in Los
Angeles. Several
chapters by authorities survey the background of this broad
topic,
using such titles as: "origins of the movement; "reform in
aesthetics:
the search for an American identity"; reform in craftsmanship;
spreading the reform ideal; and reform of the home".
Many of the pieces exhibited Kaplan's concern is interest by the
public in styles, such as the Arts and Crafts styles, and only to a
lesser degree in what amateur woodworkers were making in their home
workshops. Nonetheless, as several documents I have collected show, at
the time, the 1900s, considerable interest in woodworking
existed,
especially inteerst in creatingsomething like a Morris chair
in a home workshop.)
Sources: Frank Luther Mott, A
History of American Magazines, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1957; Theodore Peterson's Magazines
in the Twenteith Century (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1964, second
ed.); Wendy
Kaplan, "Spreading the Crafts: The Role of the Schools", in
Wendy
Kaplan, ed., "The Art That is Life": The
Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1875-1920
Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1987; Alan and
Barbara Nourie, American
Mass-Market Magazines Westport, CT: New York :
Greenwood Press, 1990; Richard M. Ohmann, Selling
Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century
New York: Verso, 1996.
Besides Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman,
the
periodical,
Amateur
Work
(Boston) contains subject content directed toward amateur woodworkers.
1901-1907:
Amateur Work Boston
: F.A. Draper, Publisher Vol. 1, no. 1 (Nov. 1901)-v. 6, no. 6 (Apr.
1907) 6 v.
Amateur Work now online -- here's a link -- is A Monthly Magazine Of The Useful Arts And Sciences, containing illustrated articles descriptive of electrical and mechanical apparatus, furniture and other useful articles, games, photography, astronomy, book binding, mechanical drawing, etc
Click
here for an article that originally was published
in the remarkable magazine, Amateur Work.
Published in Boston early in the 20th century, AW,
unfortunately didn't have a long life, and today obtaining information
on it is difficult.
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(Quite
accidentally, I
discovered that (selected?) volumes of The
Craftsman have evidently been uploaded on the Web
by Google Print. Click here for a pdf version of the volume
for 1907.
Unfortunately, I also discovered
that the details about the availability of the individual issues these
volumes seem to be unnecessarily confusing. For example, part of the
"accidental discovery" noted above is this article by Gustav
Stickley: "Home
Training in Cabinet Work: New Series of Practical Talks On Structural
Woodworking"
-- I am working on the process to upload a version of Stickley's "Home
Training in Cabinet Work". Click here for Stickley's 1903 outline
justifying the "Structural
Style in Cabinet-Making".
The Artsman
1903 - 1907 under construction
Below, for example, is
a fragment of statement by Horace Traubel, prominent figure in the
organization of the Rose Valley -- in the first issue of The Artsman:
the Art That is Life -- about the
principles that underly Rose Valley's purpose. Fired up by the ideals
promoted by the Arts and Craft movement, it
displays a strong antimachine mentality, an attitude
that prevailed among a strata of society during the
peak of the movement. (Using MSWord to prepare the passage
below, I noticed that the word MACHINE is mentioned 38 times!)
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Rose Valley is a cross between economic
revolution and the
stock exchange. Rose Valley is
not shutting
one door and opening another. Rose Valley
connects
in the open with industrial fact. It is not a break. It is an
evolution. Rose Valley
says: Let us go on from where we are. It
is not altogether a dream or wholly an achievement. It is an
experiment. It is
also an act of faith. It is not willing to say what it will do. It is
only
willing to say what it is trying to do. Rose Valley pays a first tribute to labor. Labor is the social base. Our modern
world has
quarreled with this disposition of values. And many who do not share
its
quarrel still shrink from making a concession to labor. Rose Valley
knows and acknowledges the situation.
Rose is not conceived as a tribute
to talk. It is a
tribute to work. Rose Valley
will endeavor to
prove that even under industrial conditions as they are certain things
may be
done to reestablish labor in the splendid inheritance from which it has
so long
been debarred. Our civilization has produced the MACHINE. It has not
given the MACHINE
to man. It has given man to the MACHINE. Rose Valley
sees that this adjustment has demonstrated its own inefficacy. What can
I do to
make the best use both of man and of the MACHINE? To enslave the man to
the MACHINE
is to make the worst use of both.
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 In
1905, Popular Mechanics began its
annual, Shop
Notes, and
continued its publication until the 1930s. That Lee Valley, the
Canadian-based woodwork and garden tool distributor, saw fit to reprint
and sell these volumes in their stores and mail order catalogs in the
21st century speaks "volumes" about Shop Notes
persistent usefulness for American "mechanics" and othe craftsman such
as woodworkers. (The advertisement in the image on the left comes from
a 1906 issue of Publishers Weekly.
Click here for a Google Books pdf version of a 1921
volume of Shopnotes.)
In
1980, Dover Press reprinted articles from Popular
Mechanics of this decade, all on Arts and Crafts
projects. For more, check this page out: The
Morris Chair as an Icon of Amateur Woodworkers .
Additional
Titles: under construction
American
Homes and Gardens Vol. 1, no. 1 (July 1905)-v. 12, no. 9 (Sept. 1915) Monthly 12 v. New York : Munn and Co., Continues: Scientific American building monthly./ Absorbed by: House & garden. (These are notes from entry on AHG in worldcat database.)
Bungalow
Magazine 1909 -1918
Handicraft 1902 - 1912
House and
Garden 1901
- 1993
House
Beautiful 1896
- present
International
Studio
Ladies Home Journal 1883
- present
The Philistine 1895
- 1915
Woodworker's
Manuals:
Click
here for a selected and partially annotated list of woodworker's
manuals published between 1901 and 1910.
For
statistics on number of woodworker's manuals published decade by
decade, see manuals access page
-- more and more frequently, copies of
woodworker's
manuals are being digitized and uploaded to the Internet by Google
Books.
I
try to keep up with these events, and indicate appropriately the titles
of woodworker's manuals that can be read on the Web, but it is a large
job, so I ask that readers inform me if they encounter web-based
manuals.
Lippincott,
the mainline Philadelphia publisher, established a London office in
1875, "to handle its growing import business"
Source:
John Tebbel, History
of Book Publishing in the
United States,
NY, Bowker, 1975, v 2, p 284 -- note
in nyt]
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