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What is the history of magazines?
History
The Gentleman’s Magazine, first published in 1731, in London, is considered to have been the first general-interest magazine. Edward Cave, who edited The Gentleman’s Magazine under the pen name “Sylvanus Urban”, was the first to use the term “magazine”, on the analogy of a military storehouse of varied materiel, originally derived from the Arabic makazin “storehouses”.
The oldest consumer magazine still in print is The Scots Magazine, which was first published in 1739, though multiple changes in ownership and gaps in publication totalling over 90 years weaken that claim. Lloyd’s List was founded in Edward Lloyd’s England coffee shop in 1734; it is still published as a daily business newspaper.
Magazines were the dominant mass medium in the United States from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. They helped create a national culture of shared references, information, perspectives, and literature, and as the premier venue for advertising nationally available products, created a national material culture as well. In 2000, despite the rise of competing media, more than 17,000 consumer magazines were published in the United States. The 758 of those titles tracked by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, an industry group, reported over 378 million in aggregate circulation that year.
Barely differentiated from newspapers in the eighteenth century, magazines soon functioned as more durable anthology and miscellany, defining national literature and national identity. Initially, ties to England were strong. The term “magazine” itself originates with British monthlies, beginning in 1731 with the Gentleman’s Magazine, adopting the word’s sense of storehouse. Names of early-nineteenth-century American Magazines continued to suggest a collection of miscellaneous but precious contents, with such words as “museum,” “repository,” “casket,” or “cabinet” in their titles. Eighteenth-century American magazines were largely reprints from books, newspapers, and other magazines, often from England, though some editors sought out original contributions. In a country that lacked a class of professional writers, these were often hard to obtain. Nineteenth-century magazines likewise maintained strong ties to England’s literary production. As they reprinted British literature—pirated or paid for—they did less than they might have to foster American literature, until changes in copyright law made piracy a less attractive alternative to paying American authors. While periodical circulations remained small, however, reprints and exchanges among newspapers and magazines effectively distributed news, literature, and information nationwide.
Individual eighteenth-century magazines circulated locally to only a few hundred and were short lived; the publishing historian Frank Luther Mott calls it unlikely that the aggregate circulation of all the magazines for any given period in the eighteenth century was ever more than five thousand. Many were church affiliated, and they included a children’s magazine, a music magazine, and Women’s Magazines. Like newspaper producers of the time, Magazine Publishers accepted fuel and produce as payment for subscriptions, and continued to accept such payment for advertising into the late nineteenth century.
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