Munsey’s Magazine, founded in 1889 by Frank A. Munsey, is represented in my library because of an Idaho connection that appeared in January 1896.
The magazine, which was selling 700,000 copies a week at the time, at 10 cents a copy, featured a regular department called “In the Public Eye.” It dealt with the activities of celebrities in music, theater, painting, high society, and even European royalty. A photograph labeled “Mrs. Delamar of New York,” accompanied a story headed “A New York Beauty.” Joseph R. Delamar, the article said, was “the Hollander whose success in gold mining has won him the title of the ‘Monte Cristo of Idaho.’ ” Delamar was well-known in Boise in the 1890s, where he stopped frequently on business, and in Owyhee County where the town of Delamar was named for him.
By 1896, when the Delamar story appeared, magazines had the capability of reproducing photographs in halftones with excellent fidelity, and other kinds of art in color. Munsey’s was one of those using colored illustrations on its front cover, a practice that had been adopted by most magazines at that time.
McClure’s Magazine was another popular monthly read by Idahoans from 1893 until 1911 when it went out of business. In its best years, it published the writing of Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Lincoln Steffens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and Willa Cather.
The National Police Gazette, founded in 1846, was widely read by Idaho men in the 1880s and 1890s. It was more likely to be read in barber shops, saloons and pool halls than at home. Its stories were chosen primarily from subjects that appealed to men: sports, gambling, racing, crime and pretty women. Highly skilled artists illustrated sensational stories that showed violence, including fist fights, robbery, murder and illicit love. In fact, anything that showed shapely, scantily-clad women in action helped to sell the magazine. The example shown here of women fighting over a man is labeled “THE GIRLS BIFFED EACH OTHER. Mamie Herbert and Mabel Brown Fight For George Woodward in Pleasantville, N.J.” An equally violent image of pretty girls fighting is labeled “TRIXIE GOT THE BEST OF IT. Two Little Gem Theatre, Buffalo, N.Y., Soubrettes Have A Scrap On Account Of A Man.”
In a more sensational subject from January 1894, a furious father is beating his son to death with a club because he caught him in bed with his stepmother. The terrified woman cringes on the bed. The well-arranged composition of these violent subjects is reminiscent of the Baroque paintings of the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens, whose works also show powerful movement. Magazine illustrators also learned from the old masters.
There may be others, but I have turned up only one Idaho story in the Police Gazette. It makes the same appeal to the prurient tastes of its readers as those described above. If the incident ever happened in Idaho, I have not been able to document it. The caption reads: “A frightful outrage by escaped convicts in southern Idaho: They rob a stagecoach and completely denude the seven passengers of their clothing.” The illustration, created in the artist’s fertile imagination, naturally features three beautiful women just beginning to disrobe, while the convicts in striped prison uniforms flourish pistols and threaten male passengers.
Two of the magazines with the largest circulation in the 1930s were The Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies Home Journal. The Journal began publishing in 1883, the Post in 1897. Over their long histories, these magazines published the works of America’s leading writers and illustrators. Norman Rockwell alone painted more than 300 covers for the Post in a career that spanned 50 years.
Both magazines played a part in my teenage years, first, because I read them cover to cover, and second, because I peddled them door to door. Actually, it is more accurate to say I tried to peddle them, for in those Depression years, sales were hard to make, even though the Post cost a nickel, the Journal a dime. I walked miles around Tacoma to sell a dozen copies, and the buyers were mostly relatives, including my grandmothers and aunts.
Arthur Hart writes this column on Idaho history for the Idaho Statesman each Sunday. Email histnart@mindspring.com.
