A New Acquisition: Yankee Humor- and a pot-pourri of twentieth century humor magazines

If you know what you're looking at, it's still quite possible to get a nice item for very little money. I just bought this on eBay for 22 dollars plus postage. I'm really quite excited to have it.

I'd never laid eyes on a copy of Yankee Humor before and was prepared to pay a lot more for it. It is quite rare, not being in the Union List of Serials (an essential reference for the periodical collector). It is listed in David Sloane's exceedingly well-researched book on American humor magazines, part of a great series on periodicals published by Greenwood Press.

The last issue was probably Volume 2, Number 1 (May 1928). It was published by Consolidated Features in New York City and has thirty-six pages of humorous stories and cartoons. and is 8 x 11 (quarto) in size.

Aside from its rarity, it has quite a bit else going for it- a movie theme and a rare and great image of the phenomenally popular Charles Chaplin.

I contributed some magazines to a show at MOMA about 15 years ago entitled "Fame After Photography" and the Chaplin issues of Film Fun were among the most popular items in the whole show. By the way these rare images represent the first and second issue of that title- an amalgamation of three previous titles published by Leslie/Judge. It lasted into the thirties when it evolved into a "girlie" magazine. Not a bad run at the time.

I've also included images of a few of the dozens of first issue humor magazines I have from this era. Great illustration and a great reflection of the popular culture of the time. If you want to know very rapidly about what people in a society care about at any given point in time, you'll get a very good sense of it if you just head for a newsstand and check out the magazine covers!

addendum to Pearl Blauvelt post: Beatrice Beck

I've added an interesting addendum about Beatrice Beck, the ten year old publisher of the children's magazine Storyland referred to at the end of the "Pearl Blauvelt" post.

After reading this entry, my "S.O" Katherine became interested in this magzine and its young publisher Beatrice Beck. With a few hours of research online (The New York Times being the best overall source) a most interesting story emerged. The young Ms. Beck, daughter of the solicitor general in the Harding administration, was presented before the court of Saint James in 1922. She was married twice and had four children (two by each husband), and hobnobbed in all the best social circles in New York society. Her second, more long-lasting marriage was to Colonel Snowden Fahnestock (whose first wife committed suicide after their divorce). In later life she wrote a memoir of her life entitled "Look Back With Joy. Reminiscinces of the Twenties Through the Sixties", available through Amazon.com. Her daughter, Lee Fahnestock, is a prominent and well-respected literary translator. Ms. Beck Fahnestock died in 1980, seventy years after her brief, yet fruitful, foray into magazine publishing.

Fortunately, her "silver spoon" status as a child enabled the publication of her little children's magazine and made this cute little upshot from a purchase of a piece of ephemera possible. We wonder if her family knows about it and perhaps we can contact them. We'll keep you posted!

How it all started. My first "holy grail"- the true first issue of Look Magazine.

Since I've been asked by an ephemera blogger named Marty Weil to write about how my interest in magazines got started, I thought I'd also share the story with you as well.

My interest was initiated in 1972, when I walked into the now long-defunct Acme Bookstore on Clark Street in Chicago. I came in looking for antiquarian medical books (I bought a beautiful anatomy atlas) and saw the first issue of Life and Look. The February 1937 Look issue has Herman Goering on the cover and when I looked inside, it said “volume 1 number 2”, despite ample documentation that it was indeed the “first issue”. When I inquired of the proprietor (a thin man named Roy) about what happened to “volume 1 number 1” said he didn’t know. I was hooked. It took fifteen years to find the answer. It was a larger, very fragile issue, essentially a “dummy” mocked up for internal use of the publisher in Des Moines, Iowa. My then “holy grail”, I obtained one at great expense in the late eighties and have only seen (and owned) one other of this truly ephemeral magazine.

I doubt you'll ever run across a copy of this magazine. If you do, expect to pay upwards of $5000 for it.

Pearl Blauvelt

Superficially, this entry doesn't appear to be directly related to magazines but, in fact, it is. Since this blog is my personal and exclusive forum, cut me a little slack, read on and you'll see what I mean.

Thanks to the interests of my "significant other" Katherine Mitchell, we just attended the annual "2009 Outsider Art Fair" in NYC and purchased three drawings from the Maxwell Projects Gallery by someone who I had never heard of before, a women named Pearl Blauvelt. Mrs. Blauvelt (1893-1987) was a reclusive reprobate who lived in northern Pennsylvania. After she was placed in a nursing home, a box full of 800 of her drawings was found in her home. The uniquely untrained and primitive style attracted attention from the outsider art community and some of these drawings are now in the permanent collection of MOMA in Manhattan (a nice little review and additional information and images can be found at http://www.ksartonline.com/pbmmex.html).

So how does all this relate to magazines? Pearl Blauvelt spent a good portion of her later life drawing images of what she saw- among them catalog pages, store shelves, common objects around her home and landscape images from her travels- essentially her own visual magazine. The word "magazine" means a storehouse and Blauvelt's work is a quintessential example of its use. Her work is a magazine of her life, serenpiditously discovered and appreciated long after it was done.

Here are the blauvelt drawings we purchased followed by other wonder illustrative examples from my collection. Pardon me for this little regression into sentimentality and philosophy, but this blog is my magazine.

Many other magazine "illustrators" are quite famous for capturing images of American life. Winslow Homer, Frederick Remington and Norman Rockwell first come to mind. While these are through a more traditional eye, the concept is quite the same, capturing for posterity images of life and popular culture otherwise undocumented.

I found this at a paper show some years ago. It is a completely unrecorded image by Winslow Homer in a virtually unknown periodical. It does not appear in any Homer bibliography, publicly reproduced here for the first time.

addendum: the image below led me to Professor David Frederick Tatham of Syracuse Unversity (presently teaching in England), the foremost authority on the works of Winslow Homer. He kindly informed me that this illustration was first published in a book. I reproduce his e-mail here:

The image is indeed Homer's work but it had previously been published as a book illustration. The book is: Vieux Moustache [pseudonym for Clarence Gordon], That Good Old Time or, Our Fresh and Salt Tutors, published by Hurd & Houghton in (as I recall 1867 or 1868). It went through several printings, one as late as 1870. I would be more definite about the details if I were in Syracuse but I'm in London this semester. You'll find a little discussion of the illustrations in my book Winslow Homer and the Illustrated Book (Syracuse University Press). I had known of the reuse of the illustration in the Young Sportsman. Very interesting.

My sincere thanks to Professor Tatham: as I said, knowledge is the key to collecting magazines.

To return to the "amateur" theme of this entry, I fell in love with this magazine the minute I saw it. It is a little periodical of children's stories, probably the only surviving copy. I will let the hand-written note inside the front cover speak for itself.

"this little magazine was started, as you can see, in October 1910 by Beatrice Beck, daughter of James M. Beck, old friend of my father (Wm M. Gilbert) & attorney general of the U.S., later ambassador to the court of St. James.

The magazine "folded" after a month as Beatrice & her friends found out they couldn't run a magazine & do their homework too- "

Harriet Gilbert Bucklee

White Plains, N.Y.

1944

addendum: After reading this entry, my "S.O" Katherine became interested in this magzine and its young publisher Beatrice Beck. With a few hours of research online (The New York Times being the best overall source) a most interesting and convuluted story emerged. The young Ms. Beck, daughter of the Ambassador, was presented before the court of Saint James in 1922. She was married twice and had four children (two by each husband), and hobnobbed in all the best social circles in New York society. Her second, more long-lasting marriage was to Colonel Snowden Fahnestock (whose first wife committed suicide after their divorce). In later life she wrote a memoir of her life entitled "Look Back With Joy. Reminiscinces of the Twenties Through the Sixties", available through Amazon.com. Her daughter, Lee Fahnestock, is a prominent and well-respected literary translator. Ms. Beck Fahnestock died in 1980, seventy years of fruitful life after her brief, yet productive, foray into magazine publishing.

Fortunately, her "silver spoon" status as a child enabled the publication of her little children's magazine and made this cute little upshot from a purchase of a piece of ephemera possible. We wonder if her family knows about it and perhaps we can contact them. We'll keep you posted!

A visit to my library

Since I can't bring you to my home to personally see my collection, i figured I'd do the second best thing- bring it to you. So here is a cyber tour of my library, one that's thirty years in the making and still growing.

Lets start from the earliest. Every volume in this bookcase is an american magazine published before 1800, including complete runs of Columbian, American Museum, Pennsylvania and Boston Magazine, most of Royal American and many other very rare and unique volumes. I doubt if I could replace more than a handful.

Downstairs is two large rooms chock full of bookcases containing thousands of volumes and first issues of the most important american periodicals from 1800 to the present.

Lately, I've been focusing on pulp magazines. The universe of pulps is about 1000 titles.

Since pblication of the first good checklist by Adventure House, I have been trying to obtain the first issue of each and every one of them. Currently I'm about 165 short of completing the collection, an almost impossible task but a lot of fun trying. I guess I'll have to settle for a type issue of the ones I can't get.

And to think- this all started with some positive reinforcement in second grade "show and tell"!

african-american magazines: our sports

Just got back from the New Jersey Antiquarian Bookfair, held annually at the Ramada Hotel in East Hanover, a few miles from my home. It was both a sad and inspiring evening. Over the years, attendance by both dealers and customers have been dwindling, most recently due to the internet and the economy. This year it filled one large room when previously it had filled two. In their heydey, I attended fifteen or so bookfairs a year all over the east coast. Now its just not worth the trip to most of them, other than to commune with old friends. For an old book junkie it was kind of sad.

Yet, the evening was still quite enjoyable. After the show, a dinner was held for some of the dealers and invited guests. A small gathering of the stalwarts of the local book trade. men and women who set up their booths for the pure love of the trade and to share good times with their colleagues. A few short speeches were given, most notably by Gary Austin, who spoke briefly and eloquently about the ongoing efforts of the antiquarian bookdealers association to assist the members of the trade who have fallen on hard times. The conversation around the table was both instuctive and stimulating. This blogger pontificated a bit about the importance of magazines and learned quite a lot from wise and learned men and women about dust jackets, modern first editions and the like- well worth the price of admission.

Anyhow, I had a nice conversation about african-american magazines with a specialist the area, Between the Covers Books of Merchantville New Jersey, and was inspired to write this entry about them.

Our Sports is an obscure yet quite interesting and important publication billing itself as "The Great New Negro Sports Magazine". It lasted a mere five issues (the last one by far the rarest) and advertised itself as being "edited" by Jackie Robinson. It appears that indeed Robinson did indeed participate in, endorse and promote it.

It took a little while to put the run together. Today issues sell for about a hundred dollars apiece when they pop up on eBay. The opening article entitled "Will there ever be a negro big-league manager?"shows just how for we've come in the last 55 years. The third issue includes "Boston Needs a Negro Big-Leaguer". It took six more years until the Red Sox fielded infielder Pumpsie Green, the last major league team to integrate.

Here are the covers of the entire run.

Next weekend off the Hartford for Papermania and the weekend after that to the bookfair at the Armory on Lexington Avenue on 25th Street in NYC. Old habits die hard. Still looking for Tamerlane!

The Yellow Kid and Richard F. Outcault

Twenty years ago, while browsing a catalog of the State Street Bookshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan I came across an the first issue of an interesting magazine called The Yellow Kid. As it turned out, it was part of a huge collection of first issue magazines bought by the proprietor, Kevin Sheets. My 85 dollar purchase was pretty good, even for the time and, by virtue of it, I eventually went out to Ann Arbor and bought the whole shebang for $20.000. It was a seminal moment in my life since it represented the beginning of my serious pursuit of first issue magazines. Hundreds of thousands of dollars and probably tens of thousands of hours later I'm still at it and it has been one of the most consistently pleasurable pastimes I've enjoyed. The State Street collection had many items I've never seen again and many rare ones (the first National Geographic, for example) which I continue to prize.

I didn't know the history of the "kid" when I bought it, but it really is a milestone in American publishing history. The magazine had this name for only nine issues then became Yellow Book (just bought a copy, in wrappers for twenty dollars that brought about this blog entry) and then Ainslees's, which lasted into the twenties as an illustrated fiction monthly.

I can add very little to Dr. Richard D. Olsen's great web site www.neponset.com/yellowkid/history.htm about the history of the Yellow Kid and his importance.

Basically, Outcault first drew him for the June, 2, 1894 issue of the widely circulated then but now quite obscure magazine called Truth, soon republished in Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, The New York World. He became so immensely popular that the other giant of New York publishing, William Randolph Hearst, in a way reminiscent of the present day New York Yankees, bought him away from Pulitzer for his New York Journal. Not to be outdone, Pulitzer hired George B. Luks to continue to draw the Kid for him and the two competing papers became known as the "Yellow Kid papers".

the first apperance in Truth

Despite the fact that today's prestigious journalism award is named after him, Pulitzer and Hearst did not necessarily feel that the truth should get in the way of selling newspapers. Their competition, using often factitious and highly exaggerated reporting became a matter of criticism by more ethical (and less profitable) journalists. Because both papers featured the Kid, "yellow journalism" came into the lexicon, still meaning exaggerated, unscrupulous publishing.

Aside from this, The Yellow Kid is considered to be the first successful comic strip character, a genre still widely popular today. Interestingly, the magazine does not have the kid inside it at all, just the cover illustration and his name.

A very rare contemporary magazine called Vim picked up on the war between Hearst and Pulitzer. Here is an illustration of of one of them from my collection (with the Kid as Hearst).

After the Kid craze calmed down, Outcault went on to father another widely recognized comic character, Buster Browm. As with the Kid, Buster Brown was used to sell wide variety of products- most notably socks and shoes (remember the Andy's Gang TV show of the fifties?). A very rare advertising vehicle The Buster Brown Stocking Magazine, lasted only a few issues. I have found and bought three of them over the years. Here is the first issue, January 1906- despite the price probably given away rather than sold

A copy of this magazine sold at a Hakes auction in 2007 for $320. The first issue of the Yellow Kid would probably sell for a few thousand.

Hope you enjoyed today's lesson in etymology as well as gaining further appreciation of the importance of the American periodical.

Happy New Year to all!!

Repros: Caveat Emptor

As I've stated repeatedly, in collecting knowledge is power. One important lesson here is the recognition of items that are misrepresented as authentic.

In autograph collecting, which I participated in for some time and continue to dabble, the pitfalls are many. Autographs of recent sports figures are often outright forgeries, even despite "letters of authenticity". Many prominent figures are particularly difficult- The Beatles, Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo (almost always bad), Jean Harlow (most signed by her mother) are at the top. Babe Ruth is a very commonly forged, especially on blank pieces of paper. Any autograph in pencil is suspect.

Recent presidents are very tough. Aside from intentional forgeries, the autopen has fooled even some good dealers. I've seen autopen examples sent to prominent people, cherished and displayed for years and the alleged signer never laid a hand on the paper. Secretarial signatures also need to be excluded. Some proxy signatures are pretty tough to detect- Jimmy Carter's secretary, Elizabeth Clough, was particularly adept. Eisenhower, JFK and even FDR had some pretty good imitators. Not for any financial gain or anything sinister, its just that these people get many. many requests and they simply can't keep up with them. Guaranteed, if you write the White House, you'll get back a lovely personalized letter- signed by a machine. Caveat emptor to the max here!

Since this is a magazine collector's blog, we should talk about those. Probably the most commom and frustrating reproductions I've encountered over the years are the first issues of TIME and Newsweek. They are very, very often on eBay represented by the seller as authentic, usually because the seller himself doesn't know what he or she is selling.

The Newsweek repro was obviously reproduced from a volume where the originals had been cropped so the captions on the bottom two photograph's "Saturday" and "Sunday" are missing. Also, the back cover of the original is pink and the the repro is orange.

authentic

repro

TIME is a little tougher since it was printed in black and white. The paper of the originals is thinner than most repros. The easiest way in to look at the bottom of the back cover. Repor's say nothing or "printed in U. S. A.". The originals say "Williams Printing Company New York". A true pristine first issue of TIME is quite rare and is worth upwars of five hundred dollars. I recently got one that had been removed from a bound volume (without the staples) for a little over a hundred.

An authentic TIME rear

Other common repro's are the first issue of the 1883 Life. The miniatures are all later printings (by the later Life as a subsciption premium in the 1950's). The original is a quarto size.

Other first issue repros I've encountered are Arizona Highways (original is very rare and valuable, repro has a vague white line down the middle where the original had been folded)

Motor Trend (repro is slightly smaller and glossier) Rolling Stone (so stated as a repro inside)

Hot Rod (original quite scarce, repro has no white margin at bottom and printed date is white background rather than red). High Times (original priced at one dollar)

Playboy has recently produced a limited edition repro of the first issue with some minor cover variations. For now they are being sold as repros for about forty dollars. Its only a matter of time until someone offers one as original (and some unsuspecting buyer thinks he's got a real bargain). By the way, the ongoing demand for original Playboy first issues is truly amazing and decent copies always seem to bring over two thousand dollars.

Lately there's been quite a few Reader's Digest first issues offered. There may be a publishing point on the index page on a repro and the quantity appearing is just too many for all them to be original (5000 printing run in 1922).

The Constitution in Magazines

There were four contemporary magazine printings of the Constitution of the United States. I have been fortunate to obtain them all. My favorite and perhaps the earliest, rarest and most valuable is from this issue of The New Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine. A fabulous front page appearance.



Two most important and widely circulated magazines in 1789 were the Columbian Magazine and Matthew Carey's American Museum. My copy of Columbian is in the very rare original wrappers. I obtained is from a fine Rhode Island antiquarian paper dealer, M & S Books, about twenty years ago for $5000. It seemed like a lot then but its rarity made it an imperative for my collection. As I've said, buy the best and you'll never go wrong and this is a great example. The American Museum issue is from a bound volume but, as all eigteenth century magazines, is quite difficult to come across.



The fourth Constitition issue is from Isaiah Thomas' Worcester Magazine. It would have been instead in Thomas' newspaper The Massachusetts Spy, but he suspended publishing it in favor of a magazine format to avoid the tax on the delivery of newspapers at the time. Apparantly, the one who laid out the magazine had some trouble fitting it in as can be seen by the reduced type size on the back page!



The Bill of Rights was never printed in a magazine at the time it was ratified. There are two collected newspaper appearances (in Gazette of the United States). An earlier draft of the Bill did appear in American Museum. When I found it in a bound volume I went back and found that I indeed had previously bought the issue in the original wrappers. A few thousand dollars of serendipity never hurts.



All of these magazines are quite expensive and I haven't seen one on the market for many years. With the possible exception of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts (founded by Isaiah Thomas and the greatest repository in the world of pre-centennial American paper) you won't find them in one place anywhere!

Since we're on the subject of the Constitution, here's another gem. It's the earliest periodical in my collection and mega-rare. John Peter Zenger had quite a lot to do with establishing freedom of the press in America. http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/Ftrials/zenger/zenger.html

Here is the second issue of his New York Weekly Journal, containing his first essay on the importance of the freedom of the press- a true milestone of American journalism. For me, it simply doesn't get better than this one.