Periodical Ramblings (12)

 The Saturday Evening Post

   At the beginning of this year I took a look at Look magazine and now in my dozenth post about periodicals, I will point you to The Saturday Evening Post. You will be surprised to learn that it still exists. Look ceased publication in the early 1970s. 

   The Saturday Evening Post was popular in the early 1960s, but it briefly stopped publication in 1969. It now has a colourful website and if you go to it you can subscribe and gain access and also receive by mail six print copies per year. As well, you can read over 200 years of archival issues. You should have a look. 

Norman Rockwell

   Even if you were born in this century you are likely to be familiar with The Saturday Evening Post because you are probably aware of Rockwell who produced over 300 covers for the magazine. There is a museum dedicated to Rockwell in Stockbridge, Mass. and it is worth visiting. We went to the Berkshires a few years ago and toured the museum and you should as well.  This will help you make the decision: Norman Rockwell Museum: The Home For American Illustration. 

   You may think his illustrations are "corny", but they can be costly.

In case you can't read the above, the painting sold for $46 million.

   I just finished reading the memoir of the Canadian writer and artist, Bruce McCall, and here is what he has to say about Rockwell. 

    "Norman Rockwell painted 322 Saturday Evening Post covers between 1916 and 1963. For much of that time he ruled as America's most famous artist, most beloved artist, and finest artist. He was sui generis, so confoundingly skilled that no artist ever tried to copy him. Rockwell was tall and skinny, his face arguably better known than that of many movie stars. He wasn't handsome, but he conveyed an inimitable decency. 

   I adored Rockwell's work. Any Rockwell cover stimulated a fond inch-by-inch examination. The "corny" charge, the jeering criticism of his work as trafficking exclusively in mythical America, the world Rockwell populated with cliched characters -- the lovable kid making harmless mischief, the benevolent small town cop, the gawky young GI, the bashful couple getting their wedding license from a grandfatherly clerk, ad infinitum --- all of it was provably true, upsetting to neither the Post readers, nor to me. These were incidental elements.

   His characters couldn't exist in the real world, but Rockwell documented the places, things and rituals of everyday American life with absolute stunning fidelity. He had no identifiable "style." His scenes looked found, natural. Tricks of composition were ingeniously buried. Rockwell studied every detail he placed in his pictures; should you find an error anywhere -- even a tiny prop of zero importance to the picture -- the entire illusion of reality he slaved to create would collapse. So he never erred." (How Did I Get Here, p.20)

   Rockwell did leave The Saturday Evening Post later in his career when he decided to portray more controversial images which he did, in Look. 

 "But it is less well known that he [Rockwell] decisively turned a corner just a few decades later, choosing to reject the airbrushed image of a nation implicitly populated with only happy, White, middle-class families.

Rockwell did this by abandoning his employer of nearly 50 years, the Saturday Evening Post, in large part because the magazine would let him portray Blacks only in subservient positions. After including two Black children in his 1961 illustration “Golden Rule,” Rockwell began receiving hate mail from segregationists, and the Post told him he should paint portraits only of statesmen or celebrities. Those instructions clashed with his conscience. Severing his ties with the magazine in 1963, Rockwell told his longtime editors that he had “come to the conviction that the work I now want to do no longer fits into the Post scheme.”

He joined Look magazine, and it was there that he painted some of the hardest-hitting, most widely seen visual attacks on racism in the nation’s history."

Sources:

   The quotation directly above is from: "Why Norman Rockwell Left Thanksgiving Americana Behind," Andrew Yarrow, Washington Post, Nov. 24, 2021. 

    Visit the Norman Rockwell Museum for details and for a link to his useful article: "Stockbridge, A Small Berkshires Town With a Big Artistic Reputation, " Alexandra Pecci, Washington Post, May 3, 2019. 

    For the rationale behind these "Ramblings" see: "Periodical Ramblings: The Series." 

Periodical Ramblings (The Series)

Periodical Ramblings

    It does not matter if they are called, ‘periodicals’, ‘magazines’, ‘serials’ or ‘journals’, I have always enjoyed and been interested in them. Genes may be involved. One of my sisters had an entire sunroom full of magazines, with stacks of them almost as high as the piles of those found in her basement. Those who do not share this trait generally lack the ability to recognize the value of, say a May 2004 issue of Coastal Living or even a small stack of Harpers from the last century. That is the case especially when the magazines are not, in fact, worth anything and the archive is free online. Those of us who do, have a more refined sense of the intrinsic worth of those stacks of serials even when they remain dormant and undusted.

    It is not a good thing these days to put too much emphasis on the ‘nature’ side of the ledger, so let me add some support for the ‘nurture’ side as an explanation for my/our interest in reading and keeping bundles of bound paper. Perhaps it starts with the magazine rack in the front of our parent’s restaurant. I do remember thumbing through publications like Collier’s, the Saturday Evening Post and,The Hit Parader, which should give you some indication of both my adolescent interests back then  and my age now.

The Periodical Room

     

     Exposure in later life to many many magazines, serials, journals and newspapers in the Periodical Reading Room of a university ensured that I would end up perusing periodicals rather than studying. Later still, as an employee in such a room, I was able to stack piles of such publications around me and then wait for students to ask me questions about them. There were so many journals that there were journals that did nothing but provide you with the table of contents of journals. If you were serious you could simply grab one issue of Current Contents: Arts and Humanities and see if there were any new articles about dipthongs in hundreds of journals. If you were really serious you could look in Current Contents: Physical, Chemical and Earth Sciences and learn about something molecularly complex. Or if you were merely intellectually adventurous you could wander about until you were distracted by a nice cover or the pictures in Paris Match.

    Having rambled on long enough about the origin of my interest in journals  and magazines I will now turn to the purpose of Periodical Ramblings. In it, I plan to sally forth among the serials and see what I find. Many old magazines ceased publication or changed titles. Others simply disappeared. Many new ones exist primarily in electronic form. For that reason the ‘Periodical Rooms’ in many libraries have also disappeared and the spaces that once housed paper periodicals and the old bound issues have been ‘re-purposed’. The serials are now likely out-of sight and off-sight in a storage facility. Perhaps you will enjoy ‘browsing’ through some of them again here.

P.S.

    In periodical rooms of old, students were actually employed to put paper newspapers on poles.

The Saturday Evening Post

    Although many magazines have folded, you may be surprised to learn that this one continues. I found this out a few years ago when visiting the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA.

Here is the link for The Saturday Evening Post.

The Norman Rockwell Museum is here.

For a Canadian article about this publication see:

'Timing is right for this'; All-but-forgotten Saturday Evening Post to Undergo Major OverhauL,” Janet Whitman, Financial Post, May 17, 2008,