MAGAZINES
Here are some of our magazines, listed alphabetically, available for purchase:
W. J. Linton: His Book
American Enterprise (New York)
Vol. 1, No. 1, Revised enlarged edition (August 1871) and No. 2 (January 1872), two issues, all published. Elephant folios (19″ x 14.5″). Near fine. Uncut. No. 1 was published by the American News Company and no. 2 by Lee and Shepard Publishing Company. $500
Ads for American businesses in the 1870s were timid affairs — modest in size, text-heavy, and often unillustrated. This curious serial was an effort to demonstrate to businessmen how impressive pictorial advertising could be. The great engraver W. J. Linton (1818-1897), who probably instigated the project, served as editor and engraver. Celebrated in his native England, he compromised his chances for a lucrative career by being too vocal about his radical politics. He emigrated to America in 1867 and set up his own press in Hamden, Connecticut. He did not ignore American politics (notably issuing an anti-Tweed tract in 1871) but was, during his American years, primarily a commercial engraver and author of books on wood engraving. American Enterprise is a showcase for his work, artistic, commercial, and political. Artists who contributed their talents included Darley, Bellew, Hennessey, and others, for full-page ads promoting Hearth and Home magazine, The Waltham Watch Co., Our Young Folks,. etc. The centerspread of the first issue is an impressive double spread engraving for a New York wine importer showing Bacchus of the old world greeting Bacchus of the new. The centerspread of the second issue is a grandiose depiction of Charles Dana and his New York Sun manning a chariot in the sky. American Enterprise was ahead of its time. It would be decades before American advertisers embraced Linton’s vision, but when they did, they ushered in the first great era of pictorial advertising. Yale, in its Linton collection, appears to have the only complete set.
Three Freedman Aid Publications
Three issues: The American Freedman (New York, April 1867) 16 pages. VG, light soiling; The National Freedman (New York, July 1866) 24 pages. Poor, soiling and erosion with loss to the front page; and The American Missionary: Missions and Schools Among the Freedmen and Abroad. (New York, February 1870) 24 pages. VG, with modest general wear. All octavos. $750
Following the end of the Civil War, thousands of good people in the north committed themselves to improving the condition of the recently freed slaves. Numerous organizations were rededicated or formed to provide uplift and relief. The American Freedman was the organ of the American Freedmans Union Commission, established by an act of Congress. The National Freedman was the monthly journal of the New York branch of the Freedmans Union Commission. The American Missionary was an expression of evangelical Christians’ desire to live the teachings of Jesus Christ, disseminate his word, and improve the lot of Blacks in the south. Each publication is full of reports from the field of people working throughout the former confederacy, mainly establishing schools and supporting Black churches. They also include reports of meetings, editorial comments, and occasionally appropriate reading matter for children. The American Missionary also contains two early mentions of the trials of the Chinese in California.
The Leading Magazine for The Flower Trade
American Florist (Chicago)
Vol. 1, No. 1 (August 15, 1885) to Vol. 4, No. 96 (August 1, 1889), comprising the first four years, complete in 96 semi-monthly issues. Quartos. Bound in black leather and cloth. Binding fair, solid, well rubbed. Contents VG+, toned. Title pages and indexes bound in. All advertising pages bound in. Two chromolithographs (called for?) of roses bound into the front of volume 1. $300
The American Florist, founded in 1885, was the first flower magazine exclusively designed for the trade. Each issue contained market prices of flowers, supplies, and all standard trade goods. It noticed catalogs and novelties and afforded the wholesale trade an opportunity to reach retailers across the country. It also promised to “pay careful attention to new designs, in bedding, in decorating, in cut flowers and in building — in short will be up with the times.” The magazine flourished for nearly fifty years, until succumbing to the Great Depression.
Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, George Jean Nathan, James Branch Cabell, et. al.
The American Spectator (New York)
Vol. 1, No. 1 (November 1932) to Vol. 2, No. 18 (April 1934), the first eighteen issues. Broadsheets. VG, original quarter folds, chipping to the top edges of a few issues, but an otherwise nice set, preserved flat. $400
The American Spectator was the joint effort of literary stars Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, George Jean Nathan, James Branch Cabell, and Ernest Boyd. It was intended to be a response to both the turgid state of mainstream American criticism and a counterbalance to the leftist dominance of the modernist movement. With all that, it was an entertaining, serious read, full of worthy contributions from the editors and their friends, such as Sherwood Anderson, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Jerome Weidman. Usually these issues if they are preserved folded up cannot be read without them falling apart.
Experimental Printing Techniques in an 1842 Woman’s Fashion Magazine
The Artist: A Monthly Lady’s Book (New York)
Vol. 1, No. 1 (September 1842) to Vol. 2, No. 10 (June 1843), comprising ten issues, a complete run. Octavo. Bound in period brown leather and marbled boards. Binding VG, with scuffing to leather and wear to edges and hinges. Contents VG, with foxing. One plate excised from the February 1843 issue. $750
Though the Artist, despite its name, was intended to compete with Godey’s and Peterson’s in the ladies fashion category, publisher Quarré announced in his opening message, “The engravings, drawings and paintings, with which ‘The Artist ’will be adorned, are executed by a process hitherto unknown, and by it we shall be enabled to represent Flowers, with their own brilliant tints; Landscapes with the joyous verdure of Spring, and Portraits of young and lovely women, in whose complexions will be blended the rose and lily. Avoiding the ordinary mode of clothing every subject in ‘customary suits of solemn black,’ our embellishments will present the gladsome hues of nature, the lively coloring of flowers, of birds, and of fashionable costumes.” Each issue carried three plates, one a colored fashion plate, one an embossed plate usually a colored floral, and one a colored landscape or black and white engraving. Some may have been hand-colored but many are produced in a method or methods we have never seen before or can label.
Emerson, Thoreau, et. al. for the Union Cause
The Boatswain’s Whistle (Boston)
No. 1 (November 9, 1864) to No. 10 (November 19, 1864), comprising ten daily issues, a complete run, bound in leather and marbled boards. Large Quarto. Binding near fine, professionally rebacked. Contents VG, fragile. $1,000
This peculiar genre of magazine literature, the Civil War Fair daily, reached its apex in 1864 when a half dozen titles were published throughout the northeast to benefit Union forces relief efforts. This daily, published in conjunction with the National Sailor’s Fair, was edited by Julia Ward Howe, with counsel from such notables as John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. Such an impressive editorial contingent could not help but produce a magazine with significant literary content. The Whistle contains original poetry and prose by Holmes, Whittier, Lydia Sigourney, Charles Godfrey Leland, and Richard H. Dana, Jr. The two most important contributors were Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose poem “Sea-Shore” appeared in the ninth issue, and Henry David Thoreau, whose short prose “Looming of the Sun” appeared in that issue as well. Emerson was responsible for both submissions as he was Thoreau’s literary executor (Thoreau had died two years earlier). The poem “Carpe Diem,” signed “H.T.”, which appeared in the seventh issue has also been attributed to Thoreau, but some Thoreau scholars disagree. Far more likely to be by Thoreau is the prose piece “History,” which appeared in the eighth issue. This essay, signed “H.T.”, is an impassioned plea for a view of history as it was lived by the common man, not by the ruler or by historic dates. This sentiment is quintessentially Thoreauvian. Adding weight to the argument of attribution is that the essay refers to the sweep of history as running “from 1492 to 1862.” This is a perfectly natural date to use if one were writing in 1862, the last year of Thoreau’s life, but why would a living writer use that date in 1864? Arguing that it was just a typo begs credulity. A scarce run.
The First Year of Will Bradley’s Legendary Magazine
Bradley, His Book (Springfield, MA)
Vol. 1, No. 1 (May 1896) to No. 4 (August 1896), comprising four issues in all, a complete first volume, housed in a custom-made clamshell box. Tall octavos. Box a bit dusty. Issues near fine, with light wear to yapped edges. $1,000
Will Bradley was at the height of his fame when he decided to issue his own magazine. No other periodical better reflects the artistry of the 1890s than does Bradley, His Book. In fact, it is surely the most beautiful magazine produced up to its time. Each issue features dozens of pages of Bradley’s beautiful artwork, which adorns the covers, the contents, and the advertisements. They also contain attractively illustrated appraisals of the work of contemporary artists JC Leyendecker, Edward Penfield, and Ethel Reed, prose contributions from Bradley, Percival Pollard, Richard Harding Davis, and others, plus poetry and book reviews. This is a lovely, legendary magazine. The first four issues (out of seven published) are by far the most attractive and intricately designed.
A Long Run of a Seminal Feminist Magazine
The ForeRunner (New York)
Vol. 1, No. 1 (November 1909) to Vol. 5, No. 12 (December 1914), comprising 62 issues, bound in five volumes by the publisher. Quartos. Bindings fair, edge wear, restored with fresh endpapers, indications of removed markings on spines. Contents VG+ with stamping to the first title page and the bottom of the text-block of each volume. Wrappers and advertisements bound into volume 1. Index bound into volumes 2 through 5. Previously a part of the Amy Ransome Collection of Books on Women at the University of Southern California. $3,500
The ForeRunner (1909-1916) was written, edited, and published by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (“The Yellow Wallpaper”). She used it as a platform to voice her support for women’s emancipation and an anti-patriarchal world. In the magazine she published a wide variety of essays, articles, poems, and serialized novels, much of it consisting of manuscripts rejected by mainstream publishers. These volumes of The Forerunner contain in serialized form Gilman’s novels: What Diantha Did, The Crux, Moving the Mountain, Mag-Majorie, Won Over, and Bengina Machiavelli; and her social critiques: Our Androcentric Culture, Our Brains and What Ails Them, Humanness, and Social Ethics. At its height, the magazine attained a circulation of just 1,600, well short of the 3,000 Gilman projected that she needed to sustain the publication. While The ForeRunner was overlooked for much of the 20th Century, Gilman’s reputation as an important feminist writer has grown and with it interest in this important feminist magazine.
The Publication of the Brook Farm Utopian Community
The Harbinger (Boston)
Vol. 1, No. 2 (June 21, 1845) through Vol. 4, No. 25 (May 25, 1847), comprising a total of 103 issues (lacking final issue of vol. 4), bound in two volumes of leather and marbled boards. Quartos. Bindings very good+, with light edge wear. Contents near fine. $3,600
Despite its vague editorial promise to “try all and hold fast to that which is good,” The Harbinger was, in the estimation of one historian, “one of the most read and readable of the American radical periodicals.” Mott called it, “vigorous, lively, and always high-minded.”
Its excellence was due almost entirely to its inspired editorial team: George Ripley, a former minister and excellent writer; Charles Dana, later the influential editor of The New York Sun; and John Sullivan Dwight, America’s first great musical critic and future editor of the seminal Dwight’s Journal of Music. Though The Harbinger was the literal successor to Arthur Brisbane’s Fourierist publication, The Phalanx, it was the spiritual successor to Emerson and Fuller’s late, great Dial, for, as one historian has noted, “it eschewed dogma and promoted radical inquiry of whatever stripe.” It was pro-socialist, anti-slavery, anti-war, and an advocate for woman’s suffrage. Aside from its heroic political stances, it published the best musical criticism in America, thanks to the fluent pen of John Sullivan Dwight. Contributors to the weekly included, in addition to the three editors, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, George W. Curtis, Christopher Cranch, and many others. Though it achieved a circulation of more than 1,000, it was never a paying proposition, depending instead on the largess of wealthy men like Horace Greeley and Arthur Brisbane to stay afloat. In the fall of 1847, these men decided to move the journal to New York. There, with the November 6, 1847, issue, it was enlarged to a small folio and put into the hands of a new editor, who was instructed to tone down the magazine’s radicalism in a bid for wider popularity. The result was predictable: old subscribers fell away and new ones did not materialize. The Harbinger published its last issue February 10, 1849. A great piece of radical Americana. Scarce.
Oberlin Carter’s Copies
Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States (New York)
Vol. 8, No. 32 (December 1887) to Vol. 14, No. 66 (November-December 1893), comprising the thirty-four quarterly and bi-monthly issues bound in ten volumes of brown leather and cloth. Octavos. Bindings VG, with edge wear. Contents near fine. $600
This set bears the name O. M. Carter, the original owner, on the bottom of each spine. This was Oberlin M. Carter, the celebrated and much-maligned US Army engineer who was court-martialed in one of the most famous trials in U.S. Army history. The Military Service Institution of the United States was a voluntary organization initiated by Generals W. T. Sherman and Philip Sheridan for the mutual improvement of officers of the Army. The Institution was founded in 1878, held its first meeting in 1879, and published the first issue of the Journal in 1880. The Journal’s editorial purpose was to disseminate the most advanced studies on the science and art of war and to promote solidarity among officers in far-flung posts. Each issue featured essays on the latest thinking, innovations, and inventions on the science and art of war, republication of important addresses, book reviews, correspondence, obituaries, and news of the Institution. The Journal was published for nearly forty years, but it, like the Institution itself, did not long survive its founders, folding, somewhat ironically, during World War I. Carter, appointed to West Point by President Grant, graduated first in the class of 1880, just before G. W. Goethals, of Panama Canal fame. In 1895 he was charged with improving the navigability of the harbor at Savannah Georgia. He changed the depth and course of the Savannah River to allow unprecedented import and export of goods. President McKinley then appointed him U.S. military attache to the Court of St. James. In 1897, the army summoned him back to Savannah to face charges that he and two civilian conspirators had defrauded the federal government of millions of dollars by fixing the bidding process upon which the corps of engineers awarded contracts. Found guilty at the longest court-martial in the history of the army, Carter was sentenced to a fine of $5,000, loss of his rank, and imprisonment for five years at hard labor. Carter said in 1900, “I am entirely innocent, and I shall not rest until my innocence, proven at my military inquisition, is officially proclaimed. It was proven that not one dollar of public funds was ever misappropriated nor misapplied by me, and that the government was never defrauded through me in any manner whatever.” He spent the remainder of his life (he died in 1944) trying to clear his name, but in this he failed. Modern historians disagree about his case.
[Whitman] The Kansas Magazine (Topeka)
This is the first year of the Kansas Magazine, from Vol. 1, No. 1 (January 1872) to Vol. 2, No. 6 (December 1872), comprising the first twelve of twenty issues bound in two volumes of leather and cloth. Octavos. Binding edges worn, leather scuffed, generally VG. Contents near fine. Topeka, Kansas, binder’s ticket on front paste-down of each volume. $300
The Kansas Magazine was a respectable though short-lived attempt at a general interest monthly on the frontier. Highlights include articles on Kansas Railroads; Native Americans, including profiles of specific tribes, folklore, descriptions of Indian war dances, and a three part series on western Indian missions; Civil War reminiscences; western fiction; and miscellaneous articles on Darwinism and the death penalty; and a profile of Artemus Ward, obviously written by someone who knew him personally. The literary significance of this volume is that it contains two Walt Whitman first appearance: the poems “The Mystic Trumpeter”(February 1872) and “Virginia — The West” (March 1872) and an article by Whitman (published under the name of his friend Richard J. Hinton) about his reputation in Europe. Scarce.
The Manhattan (New York)
Vol. 1, No. 1 (January 1883) to Vol. 4, No. 3 (September 1884), comprising a total of twenty-one issues, twelve of which are bound in two volumes of black leather and cloth and nine of which are in original wrappers. Octavos. Bound issues: VG+ bindings with near fine contents. Title pages bound in. Index to volume 2 bound in. Wrappered issues: VG+ wrappers with near fine contents. Darkening to most spines. $400
The Manhattan was begun by the venerable New York printer John Orr as an umbrella literary organ for fraternal societies — the Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, the Knights of Honor, the Royal Arcanum, and others — and the first issue devoted two dozen pages to them. However, when the societies did not respond with the enthusiasm that Orr had hoped for their place in the contents shrunk and by the fifth issue was abandoned entirely. From then on The Manhattan was a general interest monthly in the mold of its fat and prosperous competitor, The Century. It published high quality period fiction and poetry and had a very respectable critical department. Highlights from these issues include “Artemus Ward in New Orleans,” “The Noble Red Man in Brazil,” travelogues of the St. Johns and Hackensack rivers, a serialized novel by Julian Hawthorne, an article by Cornelius Mathews chastising Charles Dickens as a shameless self-promoter, an article on Western Scenery illustrated by Thomas Moran, and more. The issues grew in size through the run and the magazine appeared to be prospering. But that was not the case. The competition was simply too great. The Manhattan ceased publishing with the September 1884 issue.
E. Gordon Craig’s Tour de Force
[Craig] The Mask (Florence, Italy)
Vol. 1, No. 1 (1908) to Vol. 6, No. 4 (April 1914), comprising 12 monthly issues and 20 quarterly issues, bound in three folio volumes and three quarto volumes in the publisher’s binding of cloth-covered spines and paper-covered boards. Bindings fair/VG, with wear and soiling, especially to the first volume, which has been rebacked in cloth with the original spine label laid down. Bookplate to front pastedown and embossing stamp to first title page of each volume. All covers and advertising pages bound in. $1,800
Theater historian Olga Taxidou has written: “No study of modern theater is complete without a thorough understanding of the enormous influence of visionary genius Edward Gordon Craig. Born in England in 1872, Craig went on to become famous world-wide as an actor, manager, director, playwright, designer, and most importantly an author and theorist, whose books were translated into German, Russian, Japanese, Dutch, Hungarian, and Danish.” The Mask, Craig’s most important sustained work (1908-29) was used by him to attack commercial theater and to articulate a modern theater rooted in aesthetics. At its most elemental, Craig advocated for a theater that combined innovative staging and lighting with acting to project a new form of art that would change the audience’s experience from one that was primarily audible to one that was more holistic. He chose the title of his magazine to evoke classic theater. But it was also intended as a wink to his readership because most of the articles were written by Craig using as many as sixty pseudonyms, which he did not admit to until 1962. This then makes the magazine a tour-de-force. While all of the volumes of The Mask are handsome productions, the first three volumes are the only ones in folio, making them especially appealing, with their wide margins, elegant typography, and sumptuous Italian paper. Of all the volumes, the pre-war years show Craig in his most active fertile period.
A Showcase for Turn-Of-The-Century Color Lithography
Monatshefte fur Lithographie und das Gesamte Graphische Kunstgewerbe (A Monthly Magazine for Lithography and Graphic Arts and Crafts) (Berlin)
Vol. 1, No. 1 (October 1902) to No. 6 (March 1903), comprising six monthly issues (without wrappers) and sixty full-page full-color lithographic plates, housed in the original rebacked portfolio. Large folio. Portfolio is VG, with light wear. Contents VG, with an occasional marginal chip or tear. Bookplate of Rodman Wanamaker. $1,500
Bruno Hessling, a prominent German publisher of books on architecture and the applied arts, established this magazine to report on developments in the art of lithography in the text and to present examples of the art’s best work in the plates. The magazine proved too costly to produce for the limited audience it attracted, so, after one year, Hessling merged it into another of his publications. Worldcat shows only Harvard with holdings in the US. A number of art museums have cataloged individual plates from the series.
A Complete Run of An Important Antebellum Literary Magazine
The New-England Magazine (Boston)
Vol. 1, No. 1 (July 1831) to Vol. 9, No. 6 (December 1835), a total of fifty-four issues, a complete run, bound by the publisher in nine volumes of cloth spines and buff boards with paper spine labels. Octavos. On close inspection, the sharp eyed can see that the cloth of volumes 8 and 9 do not exactly match that of the first seven volumes. Bindings are sound and tight, lightly worn at edges, mottled and scuffed, and two of the spines have closed tears to the cloth. The spine labels are new, expertly mimicking the style of the badly worn originals (which are retained underneath). Overall, the set is quite attractive with the look of authentic early Americana. Contents are near fine and untrimmed, except for the top edge, with the usual foxing. $1,600
The New-England Magazine was, in Mott’s estimation, “perhaps the most important general magazine published in New England before the birth of The Atlantic Monthly…” (Mott/I/599). It achieved that distinction by paying contributors $1 a page for their work. As a consequence, contributions poured in, some of them quite good. Longfellow was a contributor right from the start (July 1831). Holmes and Whittier soon followed. But the magazine did not prosper. When the editor, Edwin Buckingham, died in 1833, his father, Joseph Buckingham, also the publisher, continued the magazine for a year. Then he sold it to Samuel Howe and John Sargent. They edited the magazine for four months (November 1834-February 1835) and in turn sold it to Park Benjamin, just then beginning his long editorial career. Benjamin published ten more issues, before the magazine collapsed and was merged with the American Monthly Magazine of New York. These volumes contain twenty-three contributions by Longfellow (including his novel in parts, “The Schoolmaster”), twelve contributions by Whittier (including his two-part poem, “Mogg Megone”), and fifteen contributions by an unknown writer later revealed to be Nathaniel Hawthorne. Critics agree that many of these fifteen pieces represent Hawthorne at the height of his literary powers. These volumes contain the first appearances of “Young Goodman Brown” (April 1835), one of the greatest American short stories of the 19th century, “The Story Teller” (November and December 1834), “The Gray Champion” (January 1835), “Old News. Nos. I-III” (February, March, and May 1835), “Wakefield” (May 1835), “The Ambitious Guest” and “A Rill From the Town Pump” (June 1835) “The Old Maid in the Winding Sheet” (July 1835), “The Vision in the Fountain” (August 1835), “The Devil In Manuscript” (November 1835), and “Sketches From Memory” (November and December 1835). Also in these volumes are his “My Visit to Niagara” (February 1835) and “Graves and Goblins” (June 1835). We are pleased to be able to offer a complete run of this landmark magazine of American literature in publisher’s binding. Its scarcity is surpassed only by its importance.
A Complete Run of the First Playboy
Playboy: A Portfolio of Art and Satire (New York)
No. 1 (1919) to No. 9 (1924), comprising eight issues (numbers 4 and 5 are combined), the entire run, in wrappers. Quartos. All issues Good/VG with light general wear and soiling, especially to wrappers. Toning and offsetting to some pages due to paper quality. Wrappers to No. 9 well chipped and with archival repairs to a previously split spine. $2,000
This surprising magazine of art and satire was published erratically over five years by Egmont Arens, the proprietor of the Washington Square Bookshop, which doubled as a literary and arts salon during the heyday of Greenwich Village. The magazine featured a lively mix of prose and poetry by James Joyce (first American printing of “Day of the Rabblement”), D.H. Lawrence, E.E. Cummings, Djuna Barnes, Sherwood Anderson, and others and art by Georgia O’Keefe, Rockwell Kent, John Sloan, William Gropper, Hugo Gellert, Boardman Robinson, Stuart Davis, H. Glintenkamp and others. Playboy was a Bohemian Vanity Fair, even getting advisory assistance from Vanity Fair editors Frank Crowninshield and Edmund Wilson, who steered material to Arens that wasn’t suitable for their more mainstream audience. Complete runs are becoming increasingly difficult to assemble.
A Complete Run of a Rare Italian Magazine of Caricature
La Raspa, Giornale Politico-Artistico con Caricature (Rome)
Vol. 1, No. 1 (June 1, 1871) to Vol. 2, No. 75 (September 28, 1872), comprising 138 issues in all (62 in 1871 and 76 in 1872), a complete run. Small folio. Bound in leather and marbled boards. Binding VG, general wear, scuffing, sound. Contents VG, bright and colorful. Doublespreads tipped in tightly. $3,200
As the name implies (The Rasp), this twice-weekly Roman magazine of satire aimed to irritate. Each four-page issue contains a hand-colored lithographic centerspread, apparently by a rotating staff of talented artists. The Rasp twitted the Church, ridiculed Italian politicians, and paid a good deal of attention to the Franco-Prussian War, its sympathies being with Bismarck and the Germans. A number of cartoons were devoted to daily life in Rome, society, and fashion. According to Worldcat, the only known institutional set is in the National Central Library of Rome. Lovely and scarce.
[Lindsay] The Village Magazine (Springfield, IL: 1925, fourth edition)
Small folio. VG, with general edge wear and loss to the corners. 128 pages, Profusely illustrated. $100
Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was one of the great personalities in American literature: charismatic, overpowering, at turns ebullient and severely depressed, a mystic, an illustrator, an authentic voice, and an unselfconscious showman. A son of the midwest, he grew up in Springfield, Illinois, and became his hometown’s unofficial poet laureate, singing its praises and boorishness whether his fellow townsfolk liked it or not (mostly not). After years of tramping, as he called it, and years of being unable to find a place for himself in the workaday world, he literally burst onto the American scene in 1913 with his paean to the founder of the Salvation Army “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven.” It was America’s first exposure to one of his chant poems (the most famous being “The Congo”, an amazing theatre piece now labeled racist and largely ignored) and no one chanted quite like Lindsay. His over-the-top renditions of his rhythmic cacaphonic chant poems stunned his audiences into silence, then mirth, then admiration. He was, in short, an original. All the powers that be in the poetry world — Harriet Monroe, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and many others — declared him so. But his time on top was brief. After the war, even while he continued to perform in front of packed houses, the cognoscenti came to regard him as a cheap vaudevillian, hardly a poet at all. In an increasingly common fit of despair in 1931 he drank some bleach and died, remembered in newspapers across the country but largely written off by the literary community. In 1910, when Lindsay was known to almost no one, he self-published a first edition of 700 copies of The Village Magazine, 75 pages of his poems and whimsical drawings. In 1920, he self-published a second, revised and enlarged, edition of 1,000 copies that like the first edition was not for sale but unlike the first edition was quickly exhausted. During his professional and personal decline in 1925, he published third and fourth editions of 800 copies each, both of which were primarily reprints of the second edition. The Village Magazine is about as idiosyncratic and original a statement as any 20th century American poet made for distribution.
An Important Antebellum Western Business Magazine
The Western Journal (St. Louis)
Vol. 1, No. 1 (January 1848) through Vol. 15, No. 4 (March 1856), a total of 88 issues out of 89 (the April 1856 issue is not bound in), bound in 12 volumes of modern blue cloth. Bindings as new, contents VG, with puncture stamp and ink stamp to title pages. Quite scarce. $1,200
The Western Journal of Agriculture, Manufactures, Mechanic Arts, Internal Improvement, Commerce, and General Literature was among the earliest of the magazines published in St. Louis and the first business magazine west of the Mississippi. It is difficult to overestimate the value of its contents.
The first volume alone includes profiles of the following St. Louis industries: iron, flour, beer and liquor, sugar, cotton, lead pipe and sheet lead, bellows, and ship and boat building. Other articles include “Progress of the American Cheese Industry,” “Hemp, Its history, Uses, and Consumption,” “Architecture, Painting, and Sculpture in St. Louis,” and “Geology of the Valley of the Mississippi,” (with a foldout drawing). Other volumes have profiles of western towns, a great deal on the railroads of the Mississippi valleys, including a large fold-out map of all of the railroad lines in the US in 1850, two lithographic portraits, and page after page of hard statistical data. Most of the volumes also include advertising pages from the magazine. We do not know if all of the advertising pages are included or if those bound in are just a sampling. Of the seven sets of this magazine in US libraries not one has the April 1856 issue bound in, which lends credence to the idea that though the issue was announced it was never published and this set, then, is in reality a complete run.