Seventy-five years of 'The Magazine Antiques,' 1922-1997

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1997 by Wendell Garrett, Allison Eckardt Ledes

It seems only yesterday that ANTIQUES was started, and that Wallace Nutting wrote me predicting complete and immediate failure. He said, modestly, that if there had been a chance for financial success for a magazine devoted entirely to antiques, he, Wallace Nutting, "the leading expert and collector in the country, "would have started one.(1)

This gloomy and, fortunately, inaccurate assessment was contained in a letter from Lawrence E. Spivak (1900-1993) to Alice Winchester, the second editor of The Magazine ANTIQUES. Spivak was the magazine's business manager and circulation director from 1921 to 1930 and in his letter he was quoting from a letter he had received from Wallace Nutting, the eminence grise of the antiques world in America. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of ANTIQUES, in January 1972, Miss Winchester took a moment to reminisce and set down the history of the magazine and of collecting over the preceding five decades.

We are indeed fortunate that three visionary New England gentlemen thought of launching a magazine for antiques collectors in the autumn of 1921. The timing was right. Collecting antiques, which had begun in New England relatively quietly at the turn of the century when the colonial revival was in full swing, flourished in the 1920s. The replacement of the horse and buggy with the automobile facilitated forays into the countryside for those pioneering collectors in search of American antiques. President Warren G. Harding's promise of "normalcy" following World War I echoed the desire of millions of Americans to reclaim a mythical, patriotic, harmonious past. It was during this time that great museums were establishing American decorative arts departments, some of which included period rooms, and exhibitions of American antiques were being mounted to great popular acclaim. Indeed, the British journalist, D. W. Brogan, writing for a European audience, found many surprises in American culture in this period and made the insightful observation, "America is a tradition-minded as well as a tradition-breaking country."(2)

Important collections were being auctioned and bringing unheard of prices.(3) As M. L. Blumenthal wrote in the Saturday Evening Post in 1924:

The prices of antique furniture, glass, china, metal, samplers, fabrics, and so on, have increased astonishingly in the last ten years. It used to be that the term "collector" was synonymous with lunatic, or at least one slightly touched. Nowadays he is legion and she is legioner.(4)

The three founders of the magazine, Homer Eaton Keyes [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED], Frederick E. Atwood (1875-1948), and Sidney M. Mills came from diverse but complementary backgrounds. Keyes, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, had distinguished himself as an instructor of English (1900-1903), professor of modern art (1906-1913), and an associate editor of the alumni magazine (1907-1911) and finally the business director (1913-1921) at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, from which he graduated in 1900. Between 1903 and 1905 he studied art in Europe. Atwood, the magazine's first publisher, was a printer and publisher in Boston, and by avocation, a stamp collector. During the planning stages he was responsible for identifying potential subscribers and advertisers and determining the probable costs associated with launching a magazine. Mills, the advertising representative for New England, was a resident of Beverly, Massachusetts, and a collector of early American furniture who later became a dealer. The founders opened an office in Boston in 1921 and set about planning the first issues. In a prototype of the first issue [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 2, 3 OMITTED] the hand-written notations reveal that the advertising pages were sold immediately.(5)

As Miss Winchester wrote: "It was of course Mr. Keyes, as editor, who established the magazine's character - its standards of integrity, quality, authority, dignity, and a pleasantly human approach."(6) Indeed, Keyes's many written contributions, both signed with his own name and with such charming pseudonyms as Autolycos and Bondome, often read as if he and his readers were all members of the same club. Keyes was deeply committed to professionalizing and uniting members in a field that had hitherto been largely composed of interested amateur. He set standards for research in nearly every discipline he published. Early issues may have been somewhat informally written, but footnotes were included. Shying away from journalists as potential contributors, Keyes still demanded facts, not romantically written stories. This objective forced him to seek out and nurture the magazine's early writers. Many collectors and antiques dealers were then by necessity the authorities in their chosen fields, and Keyes encouraged them to pursue their research with a view to publication. As a result, many of the earliest contributors to the magazine went on to write learned and comprehensive monographs on many subjects.