Something New in Magazine Making.
THE SCRAP BOOK will be the most elastic thing that ever happened, in the way of a magazine—elastic enough to carry anything from a tin whistle to a battle-ship. This elasticity is just what we should have in magazine-making, but it is precisely what we do not have and cannot have in the conventional magazine, such, for example, as The Century, Harper's, Munsey's, and McClure's.
A certain standard has grown up for these magazines that gives the editor comparatively little latitude. Custom has decreed that they shall carry nothing but original matter, and that it shall be dignified and tremendously magaziny—so magaziny, in fact, that often it is as juiceless as a dried lemon.
To republish, in successive issues of a magazine of this type, a considerable proportion of the gems of the past, or the best things printed in current publications, or to swing away recklessly from convention in the illustrations and make-up, would be to switch the magazine out of its class and into some other which the public would not accept as standard.
In THE SCRAP BOOK we shall be bounded by no such restrictions, no restrictions of any kind that come within the scope of good journalism. With our average of two hundred pages of reading matter, we shall carry the biggest cargo of real, human-interest reading matter that has ever been carried by any magazine in the wide world.
In size alone it will be from forty to eighty pages larger than the standard magazines, and by reason of the fact that its space is not taken up by illustrations, and that we use a smaller, though perfectly distinct type, the number of words in THE SCRAP BOOK will be a good deal more than double that contained in these other magazines.
With such a vast amount and such a wide variety of reading, there is something in THE SCRAP BOOK for every human being who knows how to read and cares at all to read. Everything that appeals to the human brain and human heart will come within the compass of THE SCRAP BOOK—fiction, which is the backbone of periodical circulation; biography, review, philosophy, science, art, poetry, wit, humor, pathos, satire, the weird, the mystical—everything that can be classified and everything that cannot be classified. A paragraph, a little bit, a saying, an editorial, a joke, a maxim, an epigram—all these will be comprised in the monthly budget of THE SCRAP BOOK. We are starting off with four good serial stories, and next month another will be added, and then another, so that we can maintain an average of six.
There isn't anything in the world just like THE SCRAP BOOK—nothing, in fact, that compares with it at all. There are review magazines, and small weekly reviews, and there are, or have been, eclectic magazines; but never before has anything been attempted on the scale and magnitude of this magazine. It is an idea on which we have been working for several years, and for which we have been gathering materials. We have bought hundreds and hundreds of scrap books from all over the country, some of them a century old, and are still buying them. From these books we are gathering and classifying an enormous number of gems, and facts and figures, and historical and personal bits that are of rare value.
Furthermore, we have a corps of people ransacking libraries, reading all the current publications, the leading daily papers, and digging out curious and quaint facts and useful facts and figures from reference books, cyclopedias, etc., etc.
This first number is but the beginning of what we have in mind for THE SCRAP BOOK. It is so voluminous in the number of its words, and so varied in its subjects, that in arrangement and matter it necessarily falls short of the perfected magazine at which we are aiming. Our purpose, in a word, is to give more first-rate reading, on a wide variety of subjects, for our great big eighty millions of people than has ever before been presented in any single periodical, and to give this magazine at the people's price—the nimble dime.