What can you gain from poking around in the archives of American magazine publishing?  There’s more than one answer to the question.

The first and most obvious reward, of course, is the pleasure of what Frank Luther Mott called the “certain fascination about old magazines.” They fascinate because each is a mirror of the world into which it was published.  Just about everything inside old magazines can be historically valuable.  Whether an old magazine contains great writing or art is sometimes beside the point—with or without, it teaches us about the past.  

Another reward is that magazine history provides insight into the origins of today’s media.  Most of today's media—including broadcast and digital—are run on the business model first developed by 19th-century magazine publishers.  

Since 1800 the magazine industry has been continuously challenged by change in technology and change in the reader market.  How earlier publishers responded to disruption in their day can be instructive in ours. 

And finally, the stories of the men and women who launched influential 18th and 19th-century American magazines are often captivating.  Outsize personalities and unexpected twists seem to come with the turf in this business, which began in 1741 when the country’s most famous publisher announced the launch of the first American magazine and was then betrayed by his editor and beaten to market by his competitor. 
 

This site is the online home for a book in progress: American Magazines Before 1900: A Publisher’s History, which examines magazine history from the publisher’s perspective.  Each chapter explores a group of related magazines, with the chapters divided into parts to keep things manageable.  Additional chapters will be posted as the book grows, and, needless to say, everything posted is subject to revision.

For the time being parts are posted as .pdfs.  In the future we'll post text and illustrations in HTML.

The introduction, “Background and Beginnings,” contains a summary of developments leading to the emergence of the first American magazines.  Readers who aren’t interested in a long wind-up should skip ahead to chapter one, “Eighteenth-Century Magazines.”

Sources are noted in the text and listed in more detail at the end of each part.  

The author is grateful for comments and corrections.  E-mail him at [email protected].  Learn more about him below.