Forerunners

Magazines began as genteel soapboxes from which literate men expounded their points of view, in essay or satire. Daniel Defoe started the first English magazine, The Review, during or just after his imprisonment for criticizing the Church of England. His purpose: a statesman or man of letters offers his comment, criticism and satire to influence public taste. The audience is composed of members of the same social scene that is the subject of most of the magazine's writing. Over the course of time, readers come to depend on the regularity of its point of view. The form of the Review set the form for British journals: four small pages, dense print, few illustrations (except some engraved borders and lettering) and most of the compelling force contained in the acerbic, airborne sarcasm of the text.

Joseph Addison, a high bred moralist and social critic, followed the form in his essays for his friend Richard Steele's Tatler. When the Tatler folded Addison created The Spectator, the most famous of the early British journals. It looked just like newspapers of the time: a daily 8 x 12-1/2" one-page paper, printed on both sides. Again tiny print, again no illustrations, and maybe half a column of classified ads. Historians consider it a magazine because instead of news, it printed comment. Each issue was written by entirely by Addison or Steele; occasionally by a friend.

Addison introduced the short informal essay and the short fiction story to English literature in his magazine. The Spectator lasted three years, but hundreds of others appeared to replace it. Colonial Americans established their magazines in the same style. Since Addison, prominent literary/art personalities use magazines as one of the most accessible vehicles of their point of view. They magazines they create are usually not popular, but can be influential.

In many ways, the magazines of comment of our time -- The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthy , Harper's, Weekly Standard, Salon, and Slate -- are simply continuing this tradition. There have also been soapbox-magazines for typographic and design theory -- Typographica, Milton Glaser's Push Pin Graphic -- which in their own way were as influential. The Dadaist magazines of the 1920s and 1930s combined the two forms, and ushered in machine-age modernism. It may be that the soapboxes of the Web could have an equally strong cultural influence, but it will take ten years or more to see.

1883: The birth of mass media

Plus, until congress created second-class mail in 1879, the American Post Office only carried magazines for short distances, at high cost.

The R. Hoe and Co. rotary printing press fed three rolls of paper through the press at once, and made possible printing runs of as many copies as publishers wanted. At the same time, some publishers were trying to appeal to the new publicly-educated, industrial-urban lower-middle-class by decreasing their prices.

In 1883, the Scotland-born publisher S.S. McClure dropped the price of his general-interest McClure's magazine to only 15 cents. It was phenomenally successful. His rival publisher, Frank Munsey, lowered the price of Munsey's Magazine from 25c to 10c. Suddenly every major magazine cut its prices and upped its circulation. (With paper publications, the more copies printed, the cheaper each one cost to produce.) The average citizen had always been interested in literature and comment, but it had been too expensive before. The powerful and fashionable lost their control of the arts to public taste. Magazines ceased to be soapboxes, and became mass media instead.

S.S. McClure and Frank Munsey were the Rupert Murdoch (and, I suppose, Mort Zuckerman) of their day, but in a more primal, less sophisticated, fashion. Both were U.S.-based entrepreneurs who had grown up poor but McClure was an idealist with a seemingly heartfelt desire to reach many people. Munsey never espoused any goal except to make big money in the magazine trade (he succeeded). McClure's provided the earliest muckraking stories (Ida Tarbell on Standard Oil, for instance) and help develop documentary photography as an editorial device. Munsey's specialized in sentiment and western fiction, and was the first magazine to print female nudes (captioned as 'art') in America. Horatio Alger published his "rags-to-riches" stories in Munsey's.

Within five years after its birth, Munsey's lowest-common-denominator approach had brought it the largest circulation of any magazine in the world. Most of it still looked like a book. There were no headlines or continued stories, and pictures were confined to within columns. In the 1800s reading habits were different. You started at the very first page and read straight through, column by column, until the end. People didn't flick through or skim, and magazine layouts didn't encourage them to.

But ever increasing use of illustration and photography began to change these habits.

1890-1910 Photography changes the format

In the 1800s, illustrations were engraved on copper and wood, using a number of sophisticated new techniques (or so they seemed at the time) for simulating grey tones with only black ink. Most illustrations were etched with acid or by hand from pictures drawn onto metal or wood. The process was tedious but produced elaborately textured images, more beautiful than you'd expect from the few that are reproduced today.

Sketch artists were sent to cover events like news photographers are now. They sent back romanticized drawings; this dramatic and noble Civil War battle was probably gruesome and unpicturesque in reality. A good illustrated magazine like Harper's Monthly or Leslie's carried lots of small type. It took hours to read a magazine.

Photographers and editors had to devise precedents for using photography and words together in print. The first photo-interview, between French photographer Paul Nadar and 100 year old physicist M. E. Chevreul (see right), set a precedent for photo-captions later. The muckraking photographs of Jacob Riis is Mc Clure's influenced later social realism documents of the thirties. The combination of the photos, evolving styles of journalism, and the new technology of offset printing and color process created a new language of the printed page, a language which made high-power advertising layouts possible.

1890-1930 Advertising explodes

Suddenly magazines were very attractive to advertisers. Before the turn of the century, even the most popular magazines carried only a small amount of what we call classified advertising and almost no large display ads. But after some resistance, the last of which died out in the 30s, mass market magazines all came to depend on advertising to survive. This changed magazines completely. They no longer sold people information and entertainment; their main purpose was to provide advertisers with a steady, returning audience.

Advertising exploded, but not just because of the magazine. The country was now knit together by railroads, which made large-scale distribution networks possible. New manufacturing technologies (and the productivity gains of Frederick Taylor's "scientific management") made it possible to mass-produce goods for unprecedented reach. And the invention of plate glass windows, around the turn of the century, made possible expansive storefronts, which in turn set the tone for the large department stores which placed the most expensive early advertising. But the coevolution of advertising and mass media was dramatically important. Ads made it possible to sell magazines below production cost, which made it possible to lower their price still more, which increased their audience, which made them even more useful to advertisers.

Advertisers discovered that with full pages and the new language of design, there was room for pictures, slogans, headlines and the psychic symbols of soft sell. Graphic design came to mean sophisticated visual means of developing impact.

Ad agencies started in 1890. They developed research and circulation boosting: the subscription discount offers, the efforts to survey a magazine readership to document their demographics for potential advertisers. Because one advertisement plate would be used to many magazines, page sizes became standard, and since then magazines with unusual page sizes have had difficulty surviving. Because copy pages had to compete with ads for readers' attention, editorial art departments began to use advertising-type graphics.

The most successful magazine designers were often former ad agency artists. They mimicked the slogans that were early advertising's most successful feature by playing up article headlines and subheads in bold lettering. They introduced full-color editorial spreads when advertisers insisted on full-color advertising. They reshaped the formats to bring readers closer to ads. Not until advertising did stories continue at the back of the magazine.

1930-1990 Advertising consolidates its hold on magazines

The content of the pressure changed; for instance, advertisers who had once pressured magazines away from sexual suggestion began to champion it after about 1975. But the pressure itself remained. I still remember the courageousness that seemed to accompany this issue (right) of Mother Jones in 1979:

An editorial inside the issue backed up their cover claim by citing a Columbia Journalism Review survey of magazines that carry cigarette ads. None had run a comprehensive anti-smoking article in the previous seven years. At the time, I called their advertising director, who told me that Mother Jones has very few nationally-placed consumer ads because major advertisers were sticking (at that time) to magazines over 500,000 circulation. They had run a major article on the gas-tank explosion crisis of the Ford Pinto (a precursor to Ford's current troubles with its Explorer tires) and the ad director said they hadn't received any automobile ads since.

I don't mean to blame the advertisers; they can (and should) choose where to place their money. But the dominance of advertising was a critical, often unregarded influence on the magazine format, in ways that rippled out through the culture.

This is what made a magazine good for advertising in 1980:

A clearly defined, guaranteed readership of 500,000 or more, hooked by a stable editorial stance.

The right balance between amount of text and picture. Too much text is boring, but readers flip through a toss aside pictures-only too quickly. (Advertisers had pressured Henry Luce to add articles and essays to Life for this reason.)

Lots of 'grey matter': plain columns of type with no pictures or headline, run next to ads to make them stand out. Some magazine historians credited part of the New Yorker's success to this format.

Luce was determined to create a magazine of quality for the people he called the 'aristocracy of our business civilization', and to do so he gathered the most capable and highly respected artists, writers, and photographers - among them Dwight MacDonald, Rockwell Kent, Archibald MacLeish, Margaret Bourke-White, and Thomas Cleland, who designed the original Fortune format. Several of the renowned Life photographers got their start here.

Luce developed his magazine out of the business pages of Time. Although later he would become known for his conservative politics, in the 30s his magazine had an investigative flair and liberal, if not Communist, reputation. Corporations were profiled as human, not monolithic, organizations.

In covering the industrial world, Fortune's photographers and designers created an almost hand-crafted looking magazine. It was one of the first to print high quality color illustrations; and the first to try and sell a story primarily through photographs, as Life would do later. It was printed on thick matte paper with expensive inks. It enclosed its photographs in various ruled frames, and printed them in very fine screen so that they were almost as detailed and sharp as the original prints. The confidence of Mr. Luce and his editors that they were creating something of quality is infused in every page of Fortune.

By the late 1940s quality was too expensive (ironically, it had survived through World War II). More importantly, perhaps, the idea of businessmen as an elite social force had changed somehow. They were no longer seen as the kind of people who would pay extra for a premium-quality publication. Fortune's publisher and editors remodeled the magazine in 1948. They made its format more conventional (its paper had already become glossy) and limited its content to what is normally considered business reporting. Fortune began to look like every other magazine.

1948-1973: The slick look

Bauhaus designers, fleeing Nazi Germany in the 30s, joined American ad agencies and magazine staff, where they introduced bleeds (photographs or art that extended to the edge of the page), and a new sense of page design that ignored traditional margins and bookish decorativeness in favor of crisper immediacy. There weren't frames around the pictures anymore; readers were sucked into the scene of each spread.

Influential art directors at Esquire, Holiday, Playboy, Look and McCall's refined the contemporary magazine style in the 50s. They used bigger pictures, experimented with headlines to get more informal effects, and jumped the gutter (ran pictures or headlines across the centerfold of a two page spread).

At first, the slick look was purely a highbrow consumer phenomenon, a representation of new attitudes about quality. Vogue in particular, for all its evocation of upperclass pretension, made that pretension accessible to wave after wave of newcomers (and also to people who turned their back on it, like "youthquaker" Edie Sedgwick). Like the "Creative Revolution" in advertising that followed it in the 1960s, the slick look signified a further democratization of style and substance alike, a sense that audiences as well as information producers would henceforth be chosen on merit, and not appointed merely because they represented a social class.

But it wasn't long before the slick look gravitated even to trade magazines. The typical look was that of Psychology Today. New magazines all looked the same, and adopted the same tone. They distinguished themselves only by carving out narrow consumer-group content niches: Runners, weight-lifters, dog lovers, model train builders, music lovers, computer owners, knitters, home restorers, and so on. People turned to magazines in a much more prosaic way, to identify (through them) with communities of interest, rather than communities of identity.

In the early 1970s, one magazine established itself as a general-interest vehicle for describing identity in a mass-medium-dominated world. It enjoyed one of the most popular magazine launches in history. Its name was People.

By the time People came along, however, the magazine form was largely moribund -- waiting (as it would for 20 years) for a technology like the xerox machine, and then the web, to shake it up.

1920-1930: The Little Review

Other photos include a somber portrait taken by the dadaist Man Ray, but my favorite is a picture of Anderson at Cannes in 1927 (right), just as she was closing down The Little Review. She looks greatly relieved that it is over. She has short dark hair and is leaning against a wall in a sleeveless black dress with a string of pearls stretching down to her belly, her head thrown back, laughing. I'm probably projecting what I read onto the photograph, but she looks like a breathlessly energetic woman who has style but no money, who lives for what she calls inspired conversation and who is most proud that her passionate feelings about art, love and friendship are out of synch with the most mundane world around her.

"People who make Art are more interesting than people who don't," she wrote. "They have a special illumination about life; this illumination is the subject matter of all conversation; one might as well be dead as to live outside this radiance."

In 1914 these feelings made her want to start a magazine. She was 21, writing book reviews for an established Chicago journal, The Continent, and trying to escape from her family. They had followed her from Columbus, Indiana. Her mother was a high-strung Christian Scientist who wanted her daughter to live at home. Her father, a mild mannered, hard working businessman, had kept a wife and three daughters in a constant supply of new clothes and furniture for years, until he went into a sanitarium at age 50.

By that time Margaret had left home and was living alone in Chicago, still taking money from her mother. One night, lying awake, she decided her life was dull. "If I had a magazine," she said to herself, " I could spend my time filling it up with the best conversation the world has to offer". She decided to start one, fell immediately asleep, and woke up with the solid conviction that she was already an editor. All she had to do was get people to write for her and give her money.

With that spirit, she not only started The Little Review, but kept it running for 13 years, usually at the forefront of the latest controversial aesthetic movement, frequently with no income except a few subscriptions. She lived without furniture or in other peoples' houses. Sometimes she went without food or sold her clothes. She put off landlords, printers and creditors with aristocratic elan. When a landlord said she had written a bad check she replied, "I didn't tell you it was going to be good."

She became known in Chicago literary and political circles as a vividly beautiful woman who spoke, as she described it in "gaps, gasps, and gestures." From Chicago, she moved the magazine to tents on the shore of Lake Michigan; later to a ranch in Mill Valley, California, owned by the local sheriff; to the West Village in New York; and finally to Paris. Her only demanded possession was a Mason and Hamlin piano. She could usually get the manufacturer to lend her one for free wherever she was staying.

Perhaps easiest to summarize the impact of her magazine by quoting a list of contributors: Ezra Pound, James Joyce (whose Ulysses was first printed in The Little Review). Sherwood Anderson, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, W. B Yeats, Ben Hecht, William Carlos Williams, Djuna Barnes, Brancusi, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson, Francis Picabia, Guillaume Apollonaire. The inside back cover of later issues of the magazine thundered, "What other American publication old or new has done as much in equal or double or quintuple the number of pages?"

The Little Review started as a small, drab little monthly with a forward by John Galsworthy and a flowery critical style. "What I needed," Anderson later wrote, "was not a magazine, but a club room where I could have informed disciples twice a week that nature was wonderful, love beautiful, and art inspired." By the third issue the criticism was more sophisticated and Anderson had discovered her first controversy: anarchism. After Emma Goldman became a regular contributor, ads were cancelled, subscriptions were dropped, and Anderson herself was disowned by her mother. She put a sub-head under the cover logo: A Magazine of the Arts, Making No Compromise with the Public Taste. Thereafter her search for quality work embraced, in succession, feminism, imagism, cubism, surrealism, dadaism, and experimentalism in general.

In 1917 Ezra Pound, whom she had never met, wrote to ask for a position as foreign editor. Anderson accepted, and Pound helped bring a lot of European experimental writing, including Ulysses, into the magazine. From a letter to Joyce, Pound apparently regarded Anderson as a well intentioned but flighty artiste whose publication was a good resource but who was careless about typos.

But she was not a dilettante, despite all the fun she seemed to be having. She had strong ideas about what was good and what wasn't, and why. She knew when The Little Review was printing inferior material; in 1916 she printed an issue of blank pages because no one was sending good work. She never let anyone give money on condition of dictating the contents of the magazine. And in 1922 she paid a fine and risked a jail sentence because the US Postal Service considered Ulysses obscene.

All literary accounts agree that she created a magazine which the people who would become writers and artists of the 30s and 40s read. Along with Poetry, The Little Review is considered the most influential small magazine of its time.

I want to reproduce a conversation printed in its pages, between Anderson (MCA) and her friend and constant contributor, Jane Heap (JH). They lived together during most of the magazine's history, and Heap, known to readers only by her initials, defended the aesthetic stance of the magazine in a series of short critical articles. There is one publishes photograph of JH: it shows a young, stout, half-Norwegian woman with choppy brown hair and a look of sardonic detachment. Both women were compulsive talkers and argued continuously with each other, Anderson in exaggerated gasps and Heap in an acerbic monotone: The conversation begins here.

The future of magazines (a 1979 snapshot)

Small press magazines are often judged against commercial ones, even though they have different goals and expectations. Next to the slicks, most literary magazines look - amateurish. Or else inbred: part of the carefully constructed, literary-critical establishment. For the consumer, there isn't that much reason to look through the hundreds on the shelves of large bookstores. This is changing as small new magazines are trying to reach a less insulated audience, but it still almost impossible to be noticed on a scale large enough to insure economical survival.

Magazines may bloom most dramatically where alternatives are most needed - in local communities and corporate house organs. Those company and regional magazines which experiment with in-depth reporting, and alternative graphic styles which don't parrot the slicks, seem to latch onto a real, otherwise unspoken demand.

One or two magazine historians suggest that with increasing computerization, magazines will individually directed to subscribers. A reader with interests and habits on file will receive one magazine with his/her name on it, and articles and ads tailored to his/her life - what movies are playing in the neighborhood, what the relatives are doing, and fully personalized daily horoscopes. More likely, computers will break down the structure of the print media. Once magazines, newspapers and books start to come in over the home terminal, or the terminal down at the corner computer center, then the boundaries between them won't be necessary; they'll merge into a steady flow of information, stories, opinions, pictures, design, photographs. You might never have to stop reading: like Homer Price's donut machine, the terminal will type out the stories, and the photo-typesetter will click, buzz and release the photocopied pages, and printouts will pile high in the recycling centers. If input channels are kept open, advertisers may lose their hold on the magazines, and designers will have to develop another new language to give visual personality to a flowing, undivided stream.