Saturday, September 8, 2012

Watch a 1940s Era Magazine Publishing Company Documentary Explaining Each Step, From Trees to Paper to Printing the Art etc.

-I thought this was a particularly fascinating video since we do photobooks which are basically just place, click and print and a full color magazine back in the 1940s was such a long arduous task that it's shocking just how many people were employed.  We also do digitization of magazine collections which some are in full color and some are not.  It's amazing how we just scan and digitize and breeze over what took hours and days to produce.
-Silver Street Media.

more at http://news.quickfound.net/journalism_news_and_links.html

Shows the entire process of magazine publishing, from making paper to distribution. Includes Saturday Evening Post cover artist Norman Rockwell and cartoonist Ted Key.

Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archive, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Publishing_Company

The Curtis Publishing Company, founded in 1891 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, became one of the largest and most influential publishers in the United States during the early 20th century. The company's publications included the Ladies' Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post, The American Home, Holiday, Jack & Jill, and Country Gentleman. In the 1940s, Curtis also had a comic book imprint, Novelty Press....

History

The company was formed in 1891 by publisher Cyrus Curtis, who published the People's Ledger, a news magazine he had begun in Boston in 1872 and moved to Philadelphia in 1876. He had also established the Tribune and Farmer in 1879, from the women's section of which he fashioned the Ladies' Home Journal under the editorship of his wife, Louisa Knapp in 1883. These publications were taken under the imprimatur of the new company.

In 1897, Curtis spent $1,000 to buy The Saturday Evening Post, which would become one of the nation's most popular periodicals, known for its timely articles and stories and frequent cover illustrations by Norman Rockwell. In 1946 Curtis Circulation Company is created as an official subsidiary of Curtis Publishing Company. The advent of television in the late 1940s and early 1950s encroached upon the popularity of general interest periodicals like the Post and the Journal, and in March, 1962, Curtis Publishing's president Robert A. MacNeal announced that the company had lost money for the first time since its incorporation, more than 70 years before.

...Curtis Publishing shut down the Evening Post in 1969. In March 1969, the Federal Trade Commission directs Curtis to offer cash refunds for unfulfilled portions of Evening Post subscriptions. Perfect Film purchased Curtis Circulation Company that same year. In 1976, The Saturday Evening Post Society was spun off from Curtis to publish its flagship magazine and U.S. Kids was formed which publishes their portfolio of childrens' magazines...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saturday_Evening_Post

The Saturday Evening Post is a bimonthly American magazine. It was published weekly under this title from 1897 until 1969, and quarterly and then bimonthly from 1971...

While the publication traces its historical roots to Benjamin Franklin, The Pennsylvania Gazette was first published in 1728 by Samuel Keimer. The following year (1729), Franklin acquired the Gazette from Keimer for a small sum and turned it into the largest circulation newspaper in all the colonies. It continued publication until 1800. The Saturday Evening Post was founded in 1821 and grew to become the most widely circulated weekly magazine in America. The magazine gained prominent status under the leadership of its longtime editor George Horace Lorimer (1899--1937).

The Saturday Evening Post published current event articles, editorials, human interest pieces, humor, illustrations, a letter column, poetry (with contributions submitted by readers), single-panel gag cartoons (including Hazel by Ted Key) and stories by the leading writers of the time. It was known for commissioning lavish illustrations and original works of fiction. Illustrations were featured on the cover and embedded in stories and advertising. Some Post illustrations became popular and continue to be reproduced as posters or prints, especially those by Norman Rockwell.

Curtis Publishing Co. stopped publishing the Post in 1969 after the company lost a landmark defamation suit and was ordered to pay over $3 million in damages. The Post was revived in 1971 as a quarterly publication. As of the late 2000s, The Saturday Evening Post is published six times a year by the Saturday Evening Post Society, which purchased the magazine in 1982...
http://youtu.be/hHl5Gbk1ICc