JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 978
This
short post comes in the can’t-judge-a-book-by-its-cover category, as the cover
is absolutely the most interesting component of this publication. Unless of course you’re interested in knowing
how many paid subscribers
Carolina
Or
That’s all there is to the innards of this pamphlet: circulation numbers
for a prancing, popular magazine. This
would’ve been of great concern to the folks trying to sell and distribute
potential customers how far and wide the magazine was read. (And evidently it
was very popular: with a circulation per
issue of about 2.2 million, it was the sixth most popularly-read magazine in
the country, following Collier’s, McCall’s,
Ladies Home Journal and The Saturday
Evening Post, all of which had circulations between 2.3 and 2.9 million, so
Liberty was not far off from being
one of the most widely-circulated magazines in the country. It actually rose to
the number two spot for a little while during the war.)
This
is not to say that the magazine itself was a bore, what with writers like P. G.
Wodehouse, Robert Benchley, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert W. Chambers, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Murray Leinster, Sax
Rohmer and others making contributions here and there.
An
odd bit about
it would take to read each piece, taking about three hours to read the entire
issue. That’s something I’ve never seen
before.
So
the contents turned out to be a bit of a bore—the cover, on the other hand, is just
lovely, a beautiful and seamless piece of photo montage with some interesting
semi-hidden images. I quite like the image of the white-shirt-tie magazine stand purveyor that emerges from the shadows (above). And also the face that emerges from underneath the rear brim of the boater on the fellow standing in front of the stand.
This is just a lovely example of what ephemeral play one can draw from an unexpected source.
