Cover Story
“Magazine” descends from the Arabic for “storehouse,” and what is a magazine but a storehouse of words, images, and ideas? In the rich and varied exhibition “Magazines and the American Experience: Highlights from the Collection of Steven Lomazow MD,” New York City’s Grolier Club examined the multifarious history of the American magazine. The winter 2020-21 show presented hundreds of covers evocative of a vibrant phenomenon dating to the 1741 debuts of Benjamin Franklin’s American Magazine and Historical Chronicle, and The General Magazine, which was published by Andrew Bradford in 1744 (p. 46). Since then, reflecting the nation’s evolution, myriad titles have come and gone, some after a lone issue, some after decades of journalistic, artistic, and commercial success.
“America was founded on the principle of making something new and better, and magazines represent the same principle,” says Julie Carlsen, who with physician and collector Lomazow curated the show. “We Americans always want to make our union more perfect and to find community. Magazines are a way for people in the same demographic to connect with one another, and for people in different demographics to discover that they share common interests. A magazine’s readership is a sort of trans-local community.”
The smartest people in town might be writing books, and the most important people in town might from 1963, expecting to see a lot of coverage of the civil rights movement but instead encountered a wide range of information that disrupted my expectations. The same was true of , an openly gay magazine that was on newsstands before , which always gets credit as a landmark in the sexual revolution—another example of history correcting memory.”
