The American Magazine

by Amy Janello and Brennon Jones

Harry N. Abrams, Inc.; 240 pages.

Perfect for a coffee table already piled high with magazines, this book colorfully documents the 250-year history of the medium since Benjamin Franklin’s rival Andrew Bradford started in 1741 what is considered the first American magazine. Bradford was out of business in three months, but Americans quickly developed a taste for the news, gossip, and political rhetoric contained in the host of periodicals that sprang up in his wake.

In 1788 George Washington wrote, “I consider such vehicles of knowledge more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry and meliorate the morals of an enlightened and free people.” Books were long and expensive; magazines became an affordable, alternate public forum that allowed their readers access to new ideas that would later be discussed in the drawing room, coffee house, or tavern.

Some of these ideas were enormous. Magazines brought us the crusading words of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator and opened our eyes to Carson McCullers’s “silent spring.” They are also perhaps the truest register of national cultural changes. Popular Mechanics and American Horticulturist reflect the post-World War I interest in hobbies and diversions. For a startlingly intense sense of what the 1960s were like, just pick up any copy of Esquire or Life published in that decade.

Brisk and informative, The American Magazine offers essays on magazine publishing, prose, illustration, and design. The kingpins of editing and publishing are here, offering their own stories and anecdotes on the work of the magazine world. When asked how a weekly so shamelessly opinionated as Time could call itself a newsmagazine, Henry Luce said, “I invented the idea, so I guess I can call it anything I like.” We also hear from the Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich about how he was so determined to get a story from Ernest Hemingway that, after badgering the author for months, Hemingway finally said they could decide the matter with a beer-can-shooting contest. Gingrich got his story, despite the fact that before the contest he had never pulled a trigger in his life. “I guess he was more drunk than I was,” Gingrich explained.

Though we are constantly hearing of magazine failures today, most of their colonial predecessors did little better. A time-line in the back of the book reveals that of the eleven magazines that sprang up in the 1790s, only four lasted for more than a year. Only one is still going: this year The Old Farmer’s Almanac is celebrating its bicentennial.

So despite the current woes of the publishing business and the fears of an increasingly illiterate society, magazines are still our favorite way to read. The very sophisticated Arnold Gingrich said that magazines always evoked in him a “sense of wonder.” Looking at this volume, it is easy to see why.

Made in U.S.A.

The Secret Histories of the Things That Made America
by Phil Patton

Grove Weidenfeld; 403 pages.

“What have we made well?” asks the author. “How and why have we seen ourselves as often reflected in things as in institutions or places or practices? Why have we sought individuality in the things we hold in common?” He answers with a kaleidoscopic and entertaining historical look at American commonplace objects and their origins and evolutions, and he uses the stories to underline a couple of major themes about what Americans have made.

The first theme is that “two great ideals shaped American design: that of the perfect model and that of the kit of parts.” What he means by this is perfectly exemplified by the contrasting philosophies of the two car giants of the twenties. Henry Ford stuck with the perfect model, his Model T, which as the one car for everybody did not vary and would not change; General Motors answered with the kit of parts—not only varieties of makes and models but scads of options offering each buyer a personally tailored version of the mass-produced commodity.

This leads to the second theme: that Americans identify deeply with what they own, but they distinguish themselves by their personal choice or customization of commonplace objects rather than by unique objects. “Collective identities can be used as a kit from which the individual can assemble his identity,” Patton writes.

The heart of the story is a procession of succinctly told tales of American blue jeans, clocks, easy chairs, phones, log cabins, train cars, airliners, fast-food stands, and much more, with myriad observations along the way that tie together past and present in a manner that makes both more comprehensible: the “underappreciated” aluminum lawn chair is the real modern heir to the basic ladder-back; the downfall of the Model T was that it was a nineteenth-century machine in a twentieth-century world; slavers, rumrunners, and clipper ships, whose pursuit of speed above all else made them beloved of smugglers, were the cigarette boats of their times; planned obsolescence is as old as the earliest cheaply built railroad trains and steamboats; just when central heating ousted the stove as the social center of the kitchen, the refrigerator emerged to replace it; the streamlining of the thirties changed the very nature of packaging design, from a matter of ornament to one of pure metaphor.

This brisk, engaging journey through the American-made everyday has the relaxed grace of a good ramble but also the sharp clarity and purpose that rise only from the best kind of serious study and reflection.

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