Founding
In 1870 Roswell Smith, cofounder of the magazine publishing company Scribner & Company, contacted Mary Mapes Dodge to inquire if she would be interested in working for a projected new children's magazine. At the time Dodge was an associate editor of the weekly periodical Hearth and Home, as well as the author of children's novels, including the best-seller Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates.
Dodge had specific ideas about what a children's magazine should and shouldn't be. She felt it must not be "a milk-and-water variety of the periodicals for adults. In fact, it needs to be stronger, truer, bolder, more uncompromising than the other.... Most children...attend school. Their heads are strained and taxed with the day's lessons. They do not want to be bothered nor amused nor petted. They just want to have their own way over their own magazine."
The first issue of St. Nicholas: Scribner's Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys was dated November, 1873. It had 48 pages and a press run of 40,000 copies. Although St. Nicholas never reached the high circulation numbers of some other magazines (in the 1890s The Youth's Companion had 500,000 subscribers compared with St Nicholas's 100,000 in Christmas 1883 ), within a few years it had acquired numerous competing children's periodicals. Magazines that merged with St. Nicholas were Our Young Folks and The Children's Hour in 1874, The Schoolday Magazine and The Little Corporal in 1875, and Wide Awake in 1893.
From the start, St. Nicholas was beautifully printed, with excellent illustrations from the same artists and wood engravers, such as Walter James Fenn, used by Scribner & Company's other magazine, Scribner's Monthly.
Read more about this topic: St. Nicholas Magazine
Famous quotes containing the word founding:
“The responsible business men of this country put their shoulders to the wheel. It is in response to this universal demand that we are founding today, All-American Airways.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)