The roman and italic face, used later for Peter Poodle, Toy Maker to the King, was now designed for American Type Founders; and while building a home in Concord, adjoining Hawthorne’s “Wayside,” and working every day in the open, regaining lost health, the story, Castle Perilous, was written—also outdoors. These activities were followed by a request from Mr. Nelson, president of American Type Founders, that I undertake a campaign of type display and publicity for the Foundry, with a promise to cut any decorative or type designs that I might supply, also to purchase as many Miehle presses as might be required for the printing—an invitation to which I replied with an enthusiastic “Yes!” [In this way Bradley’s famous set of Chap Books was inaugurated—Ed.]
During this type-display and foundry-publicity period Castle Perilous, as a three-part serial, with illustrations made afternoons following mornings spent with American Type Founders at Communipaw, was published in Collier’s; and in 1907 I became that publication’s art editor. Sometime during the intervening years—I can’t remember where or when—time was found for designing several Collier’s covers.
From 1910 to 1915, again with my own studios, I took care of the art editorship of a group of magazines: Good Housekeeping, Century, Metropolitan and others, also an assignment from the Batten Advertising Agency and, as recreation, wrote eleven Tales of Noodleburg for St. Nicholas.
THE MAGAZINE WORLD
—AN INTERPOLATION
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.