A Chronicle of Magazine Covers (3) 1810-1820

The comprehensive reference for this decade is A History and Bibiography of American Magazines 1810-1820 by Neal L. Edgar. Scarecow Press, Metuchen, N.J. 1975. 379 pages chock-full of great and unique information. Edgar documents 223 new magazines and 34 holdovers for a total of 257. After 1820, the number gets unmanageably large.

Wrappers in this era have a very characteristic look, most adapting the design of a frame surrounding the text. It is obvious that quite a bit of "borrowing " went on. American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review is my favorite, providing an engraving the building it was published in on the front wrapper.

American Journal Of Science (Silliman's Journal) is America's longest continuously published magazine.

As you can surmise, I've seen and collected a few magazines in my time!

Here's some more wrappers from this decade:

The venerable and long-standing North American Review

The earliest Kentucky publication I own.

A couple of early Ohio titles.

Two from the new publishing center of Baltimore. Another important title published here is the commonly seen Niles Weekly Register.

My nominees for the two best inside engravings:

Fulton's Steamboat from Archives of Useful Knowledge

and an early cross-dresser!

I have dozens of other volumes from this decade, but you should have a pretty idea of what was going on a the time from the above examples. See you soon in the next decade!

One Publisher Couldn't Wait and Another Apologizes!

I forgot to show this image with the 18th Century so I am issuing a brief addendum to my next to last post.

This is the only example of an apology (more of an explantion) on the front wrapper of a magazine that I've come across. It is self explanatory.

The editor of Boston Magazine in November 1783 went a little further inside his second issue of his magazine, basically asking his readers for a "do-over".

It apparantly worked. The magazine lasted until 1786 and published some great engravings.

By the way, if anyone out there in cyberspace has or knows of a January 1785 issue of Boston Magazine for sale, I need one to complete my run. Thanks!

A Chronicle of Magazine Covers (2) 1800-1810

The magazines published in the first decade of the nineteeth century are not particularly interesting from a graphic standpoint. The most important magazine, Joseph Dennie's (aka Oliver Oldschool) Portfolio was a quatro, issued without wrappers until 1806, publishing the first American fashion plate in 1809. The opening article is by John Quincy Adams!

As printing expanded west, the technology of engraving was delayed in following. The first thespian magazines appear. The Apollo is the very rare first magazine printed in Delaware.

Of all, the cover of The Ordeal is the most ornate.

Literary Miscellany is the first of many magazines to be printed at Harvard.

In this decade, forty cities in fifteen states and the District of Columbia accounted for 139 different magazines. My collection has examples of well over half the titles. The best reference is the doctoral thesis of Benjamin M. Lewis from the University of Michigan, republished in a 77 page pamphlet in 1959. Here is one page from this authoritarian work.

A Chronicle of Magazine Covers (1) 18th Century

My trip yesterday to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in nearby Manhattan inspired this and what will be a series of posts. There was an exhibition, more or less a collage, of the magazine photography of contemporary sports figures that immediately reminded me of the wealth of graphic Americana that I've been collecting for the last thirty years. The images have been sitting on my hard drive, ostensibly for use in a "magnum opus" magazine history book yet to be written. I thought I'd start to share them with you.

Ergo, here is a fantastic documentary panoply of magazine cover illustration that I shall present chronologically. Within it you will find the evolution of printing technology and design that it one of my particular fascinations within the heretofore uptapped wealth of information that lies within (and here, on the cover of ) American periodicals. Very few captions are necessary. The art speaks for itself. Enjoy the show!

The Eighteenth Century: