For easier understanding by you whose magazine memories do not go back to the turn of the century it should be told that we were then carrying a Gibson Girl hangover from the Gay Nineties and were but a few years removed from a time when there were only three standard monthlies: Harper’s, Scribner’s, and Century; and seven illustrated weeklies: Harper’s, Frank Leslie’s, Harper’s Bazaar, Police Gazette, Puck, Judge and the old Life,—magazines and weeklies that were seldom given display other than in hotels and railroad depots, where they were shown in competition with the then-popular paper-covered novels.

In the mid-Eighties all monthlies, weeklies, books and booklets were hand-fed, folded, collated and bound; halftones were in an experimental stage; advertising agencies, if any existed, were not noticeable in Chicago, and advertising of a national character used only quarter-page cover space. But something in the air already quickened imagination, and the Nineties gave us more magazines and better display.

In 1907, magazines were shedding swaddling clothes and getting into rompers; the Saturday Evening Post had cast off its pseudo-Benjamin Franklin dress and adopted a live editorial policy that was winning readers and advertising; Edward Bok had ventured a Harrison Fisher head on a Ladies’ Home Journal cover and won a fifty-thousand gain in newsstand sales, and Robert Collier had built a subscription-book premium into a national weekly.