Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 June 1884 — The Popular Magazine. [ARTICLE]

The Popular Magazine.

The late Mr. James T. Fields, while conducting the Atlantic Monthly, on one occasion remarked that he could make his magazine so good that nobody would read it. This statement involved no Almost any author, who has attained to some degree of eminence, will, though perhaps reluctantly, acknowledge that in order to produce books that will “sell” he has been under the necessity of “writing down” to the level of the appreciative capacities of the great majority of the reading Sublie. A magazine whose every numer may be relied upon for containing two or three popular stories enters a large circle of buyers who would never be at the pains to cut the leaves of an article devoted to literary criticism or abstruse questions of science. Let two or three pages of “wit and humor” be added, still larger becomes the circle of reading patrons, for few are the capacities below the appreciation of a joke. In addition, let but comic and miscellaneous illustrations be introduced, and all that prevents the universal circulation of such a magazine is the competition of rival magazines of the same sort. Everybody, from the elegant lady in the parlor to the scullery-girl in the kitchen, looks at pictures. For this not even a knowledge of the alphabet is required.— Cor. New York Times.