In 1907, magazines were shedding swaddling clothes and getting into rompers; the Saturday Evening Post had cast off its pseudo-Benjamin Franklin dress and adopted a live editorial policy that was winning readers and advertising; Edward Bok had ventured a Harrison Fisher head on a Ladies’ Home Journal cover and won a fifty-thousand gain in newsstand sales, and Robert Collier had built a subscription-book premium into a national weekly.
THE MAGAZINE WORLD—
COLLIER’S AND OTHERS
On a Saturday afternoon in 1907, believing myself alone, for the offices and plant had closed at twelve, I was standing at a drafting table making up the Thanksgiving issue of Collier’s when Mr. Collier entered. He became intrigued with proofs of decorative units being combined for initial-letter and page borders, as had earlier been done with similar material in designing a cover, and asked for some to take home and play with on the morrow. Robert Collier was that kind of a boss—a joy!
Of the Thanksgiving issue Royal Cortissoz wrote: “This week’s number has has just turned up and I cannot refrain from sending you my congratulations. The cover is bully; it’s good decoration, it’s appropriate, it’s everything that is first rate. The decorations all through are charming. More power to your elbow. It does my heart good to see Collier’s turning up in such splendid shape.” There were other favorable comments—but no noticeable jump in newsstand sales.
My joining Collier’s staff has been under circumstances quite exceptional, even for that somewhat pioneer period in which the streamlined editorial and publishing efficiency of today was only a vague dream. I had been asked to give the weekly a new typographic lay-out. When this was ready Mr. Collier suggested that I take the art editorship. He said I would be given his office in the editorial department and he would occupy one in the book department, where he could devote more time to that branch of the business, an arrangement he knew would please his father. I was to carry the title of art editor but in reality would be responsible for make-up and other details that had been demanding too much of his own time.
At the age of twelve I had begun to learn that type display is primarily for the purpose of selling something. In 1889, as a free-lance artist in Chicago, I had discovered that to sell something was also the prime purpose of designs for book and magazine covers and for posters. Later I was to realize that salesmanship possessed the same importance in editorial headings and blurbs. These never-to-be-forgotten lessons, taught by experience and emphasized by the sales results of the publicity campaign I had lately conducted for the American Typefounders Company, would classify that Thanksgiving number as a newsstand disappointment. However, it pleased Robert Collier who, even to hold a guaranteed circulation—when a loss would mean rebates to advertisers—would not permit the use of stories by such popular writers as Robert Chambers and Zane Gray nor the popular illustrations of such artists as Howard Chandler Christy!