Late last month, as President-elect Biden prepared to mount the dais at the Capitol to become President Biden, the Grolier Club, on East Sixtieth Street, opened its doors to a room-size history of the republic as told through its magazines. History was in the air that week, so the opening was timely. Everyone was looking to the future, and it made some sense to check for guidance in the past.
“The best way to think about magazines is as the analog Internet—they’d foster communities of people, just like on social networks,” Steven Lomazow, a seventy-three-year-old New Jersey neurologist who created the exhibition from his personal collection of more than eighty-three thousand magazine issues, said the other day. He was wearing a shaggy charcoal fleece and a surgical mask that fluttered in and out beneath his glasses as he spoke. He’d become interested in magazines as a student, in the early seventies, when he’d prowl Chicago bookshops for medical books. “One day, I walked into a store and there was the first issue of Life magazine and, next to it, the first issue, supposedly, of Look,” he remembered. “It said, Volume 1, No. 2. I said, ‘What happened to Volume 1, No. 1?’ The guy goes, ‘We don’t know.’ ” Lomazow found this irresistible. His hunt for the first Look became a hunt for other firsts, and before he knew it he had magazines reaching back to 1731 and forward to Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s and Oprah’s O. “I’m the only crazy generalist now, the one who collects everything,” Lomazow said. “It is an incredible way to learn about history.”
The Grolier is a club for bibliophiles, but magazine nuts are admitted if their obsession reaches sufficiently crazed levels. (The home Lomazow shares with his wife and collaborator in collection, Suze Bienaimee, teems intimidatingly, some might say alarmingly, with bound volumes.) Lomazow strode over to one of eleven glass cases displaying his magazines, moving like a man whose number has been called at a busy deli counter. In winnowing down his collection to about two hundred issues for display—the show, in the exhibition gallery of the Grolier’s clubhouse, is open to the public by appointment—he focussed on those of acute historical importance. “Here’s a magazine from 1774, The Royal American Magazine, which was published by Isaiah Thomas,” he said, pointing. “Its illustrator at the time was a fairly unknown engraver by the name of Paul Revere.” Many of Lomazow’s most prized magazines are bound in their original state; a copy of The Royal American wore a tattered, pale-blue cover. Usually, such covers were regarded as wrappers—people tore them off when they got loose or when several issues were bound in volumes—so finding an eighteenth-century periodical with the cover intact is rare.
Lomazow gestured toward a covered copy of The Columbian Magazine, published in Philadelphia, in August, 1787. “The Columbian Magazine is probably the most significant magazine of that era—it had the greatest engravings and some of the best literature,” he said. In this case, the original purchaser had his name scrawled across the top of the cover: “Benjamin Franklin, Esq.” “If you didn’t have the wrapper, you would never have known.”
Most Revolutionary-era magazines had local audiences, small by today’s measure (press runs were in the low thousands or fewer), but popular issues were passed hand to hand. The surprising thing today is not how many long-forgotten publications served early American society but how much from their pages has come down to us. Lomazow pointed to an issue of The American Museum, from May, 1789, spread open to an article on colonial slavery. It read, “Here is presented to our view, one of the most horrid spectacles.” The article was accompanied by a long fold-out illustration of kidnapped Africans packed shoulder to shoulder on the lower deck of a slave ship, an image that is still famous. “This is the first published illustration of a loaded slave ship,” Lomazow said. The image caused an uproar when it came out.
Another widely known engraving, of British muskets being discharged in tandem during the Boston Massacre, is often attributed to Paul Revere, because Revere copied it somewhere along the line. (If one magazine contained a striking illustration, others would often trace and reprint it, like a wire photograph making the rounds.) But the illustration had previously appeared in a London magazine, Freeholder’s, in 1770—“Some Brits over there didn’t like what they were doing here, either,” Lomazow said—and is the only contemporary magazine image of the incident. “The interesting thing about this engraving is Crispus Attucks”—thought to be the first victim of the massacre, and thus the first casualty of the American Revolution. “They make him white. He was Black. Very, very few versions had his true race in the print.”
“Magazine,” which comes from the word for “storehouse,” shares an etymology with the French magasin, or “shop”: the concept was to bring different offerings together, and accordingly they became venues where key dramas of the early nation played out. Debate between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans (federal control versus states’ rights) was carried out largely in the volley of The Port Folio and The National Magazine. The dissolution of the Whigs into the Know-Nothings (the Proud Boys of the eighteen-fifties, as Lomazow likes to describe them) happened largely in the nativist turn of The American Review. These dramas are borne out in the Grolier’s one-room display, the paper trail of a nation running, stumbling, and trying to carry its unifying ideas forward.
Many magazines also publish fiction and poetry, of course, and are thus meadows for the nation’s literary progress. Lomazow hunts big game. He has Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, from October, 1851, which contains the first published excerpt of “Moby-Dick.” He owns the issue of New England Magazine from January, 1892, which contains the story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by a writer then going by Charlotte Perkins Stetson (known today as Charlotte Perkins Gilman). Much as Lomazow likes first issues, he seeks out first appearances by now-celebrated writers. The exhibition includes a copy of the January, 1834, Lady’s Book, the first nationally circulated publication to accept a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. The August, 1841, edition of the anti-Whig periodical The United States Magazine and Democratic Review contained the first known fiction publication, “Death in the School-Room,” by a young writer then calling himself Walter Whitman. Occasionally, Lomazow chases down amateur output. A display case at the Grolier contains Tabula, a high-school lit mag, from Oak Park, Illinois, in 1916, that contains Ernest Hemingway’s earliest appearance in print. So, any good? “It’s O.K.,” Lomazow said.
What’s exciting about the Grolier exhibition isn’t how much it makes visible (most of the magazines are included face-up, as covers, not as browsable objects) but the way it packs three hundred years of shared American past into one room. The cases in the exhibition gallery sit in a horseshoe. You start on the left and watch the decades, then the centuries, flap by. The main line of the show proceeds chronologically, but six cases don’t. One is about baseball. Another is about radio and screen magazines, from the early fan publications to TV Guide. There are displays about art in magazines and about pulp magazines. (“The pulps are unreadable,” Lomazow said—yet they helped construct pop culture, science fiction, fantasy, and comics, the dream life of the American public.) And, just in time for Black History Month, there are two cases centered on the American Black experience, which trace how periodicals helped shape identity and an ongoing national dialogue about race.
Early-nineteenth-century American magazines published often on the possibility of freeing slaves, a position that had two main, opposing camps. On one side were the so-called colonizationists, who wanted to deport free Black people to a location abroad. (This was not a fringe movement; from 1833 to 1836, the head of the American Colonization Society was James Madison, one of the chief authors of the U.S. Constitution.) Their project, propounded in The Colonizationist and Journal of Freedom, reached fruition in the country of Liberia. On the other side, there were those who believed that freedom for Black Americans ought to mean just that.
“One guy had a revelation, in the late eighteen-twenties, that nothing short of complete abolition was what was needed to fix the slavery problem, and his name was William Lloyd Garrison,” Lomazow said, stooping toward the display case. “He then published this, The Liberator.” The issue, from January, 1831, had four columns of type, one in rhyme. (“My name is ‘LIBERATOR’! I propose / To hurl my shafts at freedom’s deadliest foes!”) “This is the first issue, maybe the only one in existence,” Lomazow said. Officially, it helped give broad voice to the abolitionist movement.
Print is an incomplete record, of course, and, although Garrison and the other white abolitionists may have been among the first to get their position on the page, the will to abolition, in its essence, originated among enslaved people themselves. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Black voices, including those of some formerly enslaved writers, had begun to gain influence in the magazine world. Lomazow’s exhibition includes his copy—still covered, one of only two extant—of the first magazine ever published by an African-American, David Ruggles: the July, 1838, issue of The Mirror of Liberty.
Ruggles was a literary New Yorker—he ran a Black bookstore and a printing concern—and his home downtown, on Lispenard Street, was a stop on the Underground Railroad. One of the freed slaves who came through, Frederick Douglass, became a kind of protégé, and went on to edit his own publications: first the North Star, then Frederick Douglass’ Paper, which later became Douglass’ Monthly. Douglass’s co-editor at the North Star was a man named Martin Robison Delany.
“If Frederick Douglass was the Martin Luther King, Jr., of the nineteenth century, Delany”—sometimes called the first Black nationalist—“was the Malcolm X,” Lomazow said. Delany was a physician who wrote a novel called “Blake; or the Huts of America” as a riposte to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” When the Civil War began, he recruited thousands of Black men to serve with him in the Union army. President Lincoln summoned him for a private audience in 1865, and Delany was commissioned a major, making him the highest-ranking Black officer of the Civil War. “Recently, there was a measure to take the names of Confederate officers off forts, like Fort Bragg,” Lomazow said. “ ‘Delany’ is my candidate for a new fort name.”
Decades later—and across the room at the Grolier exhibition—the struggle for equality continued with debate between two Black intellectual leaders, Booker T. Washington and the man who, in his first appearance in mainstream print (a piece called “Strivings of the Negro People,” in the August, 1897, issue of The Atlantic Monthly, called himself W. E. Burghardt Du Bois. Washington, who had been born into slavery before receiving higher education, had given a speech in Atlanta enjoining white people to reach out to Black people with basic education and “all privileges of the law” and Black people not to ask for much more. (“The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly,” he said.) In light of the speech, an engraving of Washington appeared on the September 28, 1895, issue of The Outlook, making him the first Black man ever to appear on a national-magazine cover. But Washington’s doctrine of supplication and accommodation galvanized many Black Americans down another path. In 1907, the so-called Niagara Movement, of which Du Bois was a leader, created The Horizon, one of the largest Black-audience magazines of the early twentieth century. It joined a growing list of assertive new publications including The Moon Illustrated Weekly, also published by Du Bois, who soon after went on to found his most successful periodical yet: The Crisis, which he edited from 1910 until 1934.
