Munsey's Magazine

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Richard Digby-Junger

In 1893, a former telegraph operator named Frank A. Munsey made his namesake the first nationally distributed and mass-read magazine. Munsey, who had grown up poor in rural Maine, recognized that most of the growing American middle class could not afford magazines, so he dropped the cover price of his failing literary monthly from twenty-five to ten cents per copy. Advertisers made up the difference by paying more for and increasing the number of their ads. Munsey also proved that sex sold magazines, publishing a regular page called "Artists & Their Work" which featured a half-tone photograph of a draped or undraped female in an artistic setting. Munsey's Magazine jumped in readership overnight, becoming the world circulation leader by 1907, and came to be recognized as the prototype of the modern popular magazine. As he made his magazine universally available, Frank Munsey also paved the way for what is now called the Information Age.

The first two American magazines, published by Andrew Bradford and Benjamin Franklin, appeared in 1741, but the periodical industry grew slowly over the next century. Thousands of titles appeared, but all but a very few were financial failures with low circulations, little or no advertising, and poor revenue. None could claim a wide national readership. Several "quality" literary journals, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, and Century, began to appear and prosper around 1850, but they cost between twenty-five and thirty-five cents an issue, much too expensive for the newly emerging educated middle class, especially by yearly subscription. A few women's magazines, Ladies' Home Journal, Delineator, and Woman's Home Companion, built mass circulations after the Civil War, but they were very specialized in their viewpoint, featured editorial content strongly influenced by advertisers, and were overlooked by most advertisers and the magazine industry because women had not yet been recognized as a viable national mass market.

Frank Munsey was born on August 21, 1854, and grew up on a series of struggling farms near Augusta, Maine. He began making his own way in the world at the age of seven, but it was a visit to the 1876 World's Fair that inspired him to build the first magazine and newspaper publishing empire. At Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition Munsey saw one of a new breed of R. Hoe & Company's stereotype plate rotary presses spewing out thousands of newspapers per hour and resolved that he would be the proprietor of such an impressive machine one day. To make his dream come true, Munsey wrote freelance articles for local newspapers and saved money earned as a telegraph operator. He also convinced several Augusta businessmen of his prospects, and was able to raise enough capital to move to New York City on September 23, 1882. There he founded Golden Argosy: Freighted with Treasures for Boys and Girls. The first issue featured several articles including "Do and Dare, or a Brave Boy's Fight for a Fortune," a short story written by self-success advocate Horatio Alger, Jr. that could have been Munsey's own story.

The market for juvenile magazines was crowded in late nineteenth-century America and Munsey was often broke and always in debt for the first five years of Argosy. He began changing the direction of the magazine away from children and more toward teenaged boys and men by 1885 but his periodical still failed to capture the public's imagination. Frustrated, Munsey used his own writings and the contributions of the small Argosy editorial staff to fill the inaugural issue of the adult literary magazine, Munsey's Weekly, on February 2, 1889. The magazine seemed inexpensive at ten cents per copy, but a yearly subscription was still too expensive for most potential middle-class readers and it lost thousands of dollars over the next two years even though it built a circulation of 40,000.

In October 1891, Munsey took a gamble. He changed his namesake to a monthly, gave it the same size and look as Harper's and the other profitable literary monthlies, and raised its price to twenty-five cents per copy. To differentiate himself from his competitors, he concentrated on light, easy-to-read articles and novelettes, "a complete novel in each number," instead of serious literature and criticism. He also featured the cutting-edge publishing technology of halftone photographs instead of the fine-line wood engravings featured in most other magazines. Still, Munsey's lost money. The depression of 1893 made it even more difficult for Munsey to borrow money to keep his floundering magazine business afloat, so he took yet another gamble, dropping Munsey's cover price to ten cents per copy and the cost of a subscription to one dollar a year.

Munsey's was not the first magazine to sell at ten cents, nor even the first to make a dramatic price cut. The moderately successful Drake's Magazine had sold for a dime in the 1880s and Ladies Home Journal built its circulation by selling for a nickel before it raised its price to ten cents in the early 1890s. S. S. McClure dropped the price of his soon-to-become famous magazine to fifteen cents an issue in June 1893, and in response, John Brisben Walker cut the price of his new general-interest monthly, Cosmopolitan, from twenty-five to twelve and one-half cents in July. Munsey's didn't fall to ten cents until September. But in cutting his price, Munsey made his periodical the first that was truly affordable to the nation's middle class. To help build circulation at such a cheap price, Munsey bypassed the expensive wholesale magazine distribution monopoly then in existence and advertised to readers directly, using mailed circulars and newspaper advertising.