Doubleday, and
later Bok himself, gave to the Philadelphia magazine--advertising which
was never given lightly, or without the most careful investigation of
the worth of the circulation of a periodical.
What every magazine publisher knows as the most troublous years in the
establishment of a periodical, the first half-dozen years of its
existence, had already been weathered by the editor and publisher. The
wife as editor and the husband as publisher had combined to lay a solid
basis upon which Bok had only to build: his task was simply to rear a
structure upon the foundation already laid. It is to the vision and to
the genius of the first editor of The Ladies' Home Journal that the
unprecedented success of the magazine is primarily due. It was the
purpose and the policy of making a magazine of authoritative service for
the womanhood of America, a service which would visualize for womanhood
its highest domestic estate, that had won success for the periodical
from its inception. It is difficult to believe, in the multiplicity of
similar magazines to-day, that such a purpose was new; that The Ladies'
Home Journal was a path-finder; but the convincing proof is found in the
fact that all the later magazines of this class have followed in the
wake of the periodical conceived by Mrs. Curtis, and have ever since
been its imitators.
When Edward Bok succeeded Mrs. Curtis, he immediately encountered
another popular misconception of a woman's magazine--the conviction that
if a man is the editor of a periodical with a distinctly feminine
appeal, he must, as the term goes, "understand women.
Pages:
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187