The Press: Americana

To Editor Matthew Carey of the American Museum, wrote George Washington in 1788: "I consider such easy vehicles of knowledge [magazines] as more highly calculated than any other to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry, and meliorate the morals of an enlightened and free people." If the encouragement of sainted statesmen could have paid printers' bills and enlisted subscribers, the careers of early American periodicals would have made a less hectic story than they do.* More aptly did Noah Webster write in his American Magazine,† in the same year: "The expectation of failure is connected with the very name of a Magazine."

The first two American magazines were issued within three days of each other and lasted less than six months. In 1740 Benjamin Franklin conceived the notion of issuing a periodical imitative of those flourishing in England. He took into his confidence one John Webbe, contracted with him to "dispose the Materials, make Abstracts, and write what shall be necessary for promoting the Thing &C . . . B. F. to be at all Expense." But perfidious Mr. Webbe took the scheme to another printer and beat Franklin's General Magazine to the streets by three days with his (the first) American Magazine. Mr. Franklin, Philadelphia Postmaster at the time, retaliated by forbidding his post riders to carry the rival printer's American Mercury, a newspaper.

Of the multifarious periodicals issued in the following 89 years, all but a few religious and scientific society journals are now yellowing museum pieces. Among the remaining hoary survivors are: Methodist Review (founded 1818), The American Journal of Science (founded 1818), The American Journal of Pharmacy (founded 1825), The Friend (founded 1827), The American Journal of the Medical Sciences (founded 1827). The Country Gentleman, first issued in 1831, is ten years younger than its Curtis-published relative, The Saturday Evening Post, which, although tracing an obscure genealogy back to 1728, was not issued as a magazine until 1821.

By far the most phenomenally successful of any magazine issued before the Civil war was the prim Godey's Lady's Book. On many a U. S. attic shelf, dust-covered copies still remain. Recently a passing decorating fancy has gutted them of their faded fashion plates, which are used to lend a touch of quaintness to boudoir walls, breakfast trays and lampshades.

In the 1830's a new edition of Godey's Lady's Book was a thing to be read, reread, laughed at, cried over. Plump, benign Louis A. Godey chatted monthly with his "fair readers," giving careful counsel and advice. When a correspondent asked the Publisher in Philadelphia on which side of a lady a gentleman should sit, Mr Godey advised the left, "for is it not closer to a lady's heart?"

None was more surprised than he when the magazine's circulation equalled "the combined number of any other three monthly publications" in 1839. It reached 25,000 before any other U. S. magazine, by 1860 achieved the unheard of distribution of 150,000.