Sunset (magazine)
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Sunset is a lifestyle magazine in the United States. Sunset focuses on interests regarding homes, cooking, gardening, and travel, with a focus almost exclusively on the Western United States. The magazine is published 12 times per year by the Sunset Publishing Company, part of Southern Progress Corporation, itself a subsidiary of Time Warner.
[edit] Born on the rails
Sunset began in 1898 as a promotional magazine for the Southern Pacific railroad, designed to combat the negative "Wild West" stereotypes about California.
The Sunset Limited was the premier train on the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Sunset Route, which began in New Orleans, then loped across Texas and the New Mexico and Arizona territories to Los Angeles and north to San Francisco. Beginning in 1895 the Limited ran twice a week, each direction taking 75 hours; each hour a traveler’s paradise, at least in the eyes of the Southern Pacific. As the baroque syntax of one advertisement phrased it, “Not luxury, but necessity, to those accustomed to refined surroundings, is the exquisite elegance manifest in every detail of the service and equipment of Sunset Limited.”
Someone within the SP decided this elegant train required a magazine to accompany it, a magazine available onboard and at the station, a magazine that would promote the West. The magazine would help lure tourists onto the company’s trains, entice guests to the railroad’s resort, the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey. It might encourage these tourists to stay and buy land: the Southern Pacific was the largest single landowner in California and Nevada. “Publicity for the attractions and advantages of the Western Empire” was the new magazine’s creed. If the West was not yet an empire, the Southern Pacific wanted it to become one.
The inaugural issue featured an essay about Yosemite, with photographs by noted geologist Joseph Le Conte. There were social notes from Western resorts, like this from Pasadena: “The aristocratic residence town of Southern California and rendezvous for the traveling upper ten has enjoyed a remarkably gay season and the hotel accommodations have been sorely taxed.” There was a good deal—an unbelievable amount, in fact—about trains: announcements of newly renovated passenger stations, reminders that ticket scalping was a crime. Poetry featured railroad themes—“The Choo-Choo Car” was one effort—and over the next few months, the magazine published a string of short stories populated by long-winded characters swapping tall tales, always aboard a train. Most of these early stories were penned by Paul Shoup, who later abandoned fiction to become president of the Southern Pacific.
Despite its paltry size and the incessant toot of train whistles echoing through its pages, the new magazine offered something else. Something fresh. Call it a sense of wonder—at the beauty, the variety, the joy of the American West. That first article about Yosemite Valley set the tone. It argued, convincingly, that the valley was the most sublime, beautiful, and inspiring place on earth. Later articles would take readers pleasure-touring through the ostrich farms and orange groves of Southern California, trout fishing in Oregon, sailing to Hawaii, “Land of Aloha.”
Tourism and migration to California increased in part as a result.
[edit] Great San Francisco Earthquake, 1906
Sunset’s love affair with its West was soon sorely tested. The April 1906 issue was 214 prosperous pages. The next issue was a six-page emergency edition, which opened with this dire communiqué from E. H. Harriman, president of the Southern Pacific: “The earthquake on the morning of April 18th was the most severe that has occurred since San Francisco became a great city.” Next came a message from Sunset’s publishers: “This is to announce that by reason of the recent destruction by fire of the Sunset Magazine offices on April 18th, this Emergency Edition will be the only issue of the magazine for the month of May.… The priceless stock of drawing, photographs and engravings was burned.… In one day the accumulation and accomplishment of years were swept away.”
But Sunset was constitutionally incapable of dwelling on terror or tragedy. Soon it was trumpeting its hometown’s revival, in articles like “San Francisco’s Future” and “How Things Were Righted After the Fire of 1906.” In “A San Francisco Pleasure Cure,” a tired businessman revives himself through a visit to the rebuilt city. It’s a terrible story, but its author, a young writer named Sinclair Lewis, went on to be the only Sunset contributor to win a Nobel Prize in literature.
[edit] Famous writers, classic art in Sunset
In 1914 the railroad sold the magazine to its employees, and Sunset began to publish original articles, stories and poetry focusing on the West. The format resembled other national general interest magazines of the day such as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post.
The change in ownership freed Sunset to report ponderously on politics and economics. Former Stanford president David Starr Jordan opined on international affairs, future U.S. president Herbert Hoover wrote on the League of Nations. Fiction and poetry became more ambitious. Jack London spun tales of the Klondike, Dashiell Hammett of the South Seas, Mary Austin of the Paiute Indians. Even evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson made a poetic appearance.
The art on Sunset’s cover equaled—probably outshone—the words within. The early 20th century was the golden age of magazine illustration, but Sunset held its own with any magazine in the country. Among the young artists Sunset introduced to the world was cowboy author and illustrator Will James, who went on to write Smokey. But the magazine’s single most gifted contributor was probably Maynard Dixon. “My object,” Fresno, California-born Dixon stated, “has always been to get as close to the real thing as possible—people, animals, country. The melodramatic Wild West is not for me the big possibility. The more lasting qualities are in the quiet and more broadly human aspects of Western life. I am to interpret for the most part the poetry and pathos of life of Western people seen amid the grandeur, sternness, and loneliness of their country.”
Grandeur, sternness, loneliness—Dixon got that right. For Sunset he painted solitary riders silhouetted against Southwestern mesas, Navajo sages wrapped in blankets as if armored against the modern world. Every image vibrated with the West’s romance, and yet with an unspoken poignancy, a fear that it all might be lost. In December 1906, Sunset published an extraordinary Dixon work, “The Singing of the West,” which he both wrote and illustrated. “Out of the West came the message of infinite spaces,” he wrote, “from the shadows of cañons and forests, deep-toned with the rushing of rivers uncharted, sang the song of the Century’s Promise.”
[edit] The Lane Publishing era
Sunset remained thoughtful through the 1920s. It did not remain profitable. The magazine grew skinny, circulation dwindled. In 1929, Lawrence W. Lane, a former advertising executive with Better Homes and Gardens, purchased Sunset, and changed the format to what would become its current Western lifestyle emphasis.
The Lane family—Laurence, his wife, Ruth, and their sons, Bill and Mel—would own Sunset for the next 62 years. The Lanes had the bad luck to buy their new enterprise just as the country plunged into the Great Depression. Hard times didn’t help the new Sunset find its footing. The weighty ruminations on politics and economics were banished. But what replaced them was sometimes drivel, literary lint like “The Hostess Uses Evaporated Milk” or “Have a Facial with Me”? An absolute nadir may have been reached with March 1935’s “Little Toes, What Now?” (“This is the season when all the little toes are going not to market, but to have a pedicure,” this article began.)
Still, a more muscular, tough-minded magazine emerged. It began Kitchen Cabinet, a readers’ recipes feature still published today (now titled Reader Recipes). Essays on home architecture became more specifically geared to the West, with a series of sumptuously photographed articles championing the Western ranch house. Travel and garden coverage grew similarly focused and specific. In 1932 Sunset became the first magazine in the nation to publish different editions for different parts of our circulation area. The goal behind those zoned editions—Northwest, Golden Gate, and Southwest—was to ensure that Phoenix readers didn’t get gardening advice better suited to San Jose or Seattle. (Today Sunset has five regional editions, and zones not only garden but also travel coverage.)
What the new Sunset discovered was the power of authority and efficiency. Bylines vanished, replaced by a single Sunset voice—that of a neighbor who happened to know more about oak trees or Oregon than you did, but who gladly (if sometimes bossily) shared that knowledge with you. Articles began with how: “How to Build the Cactus Garden,” “How to Select Fishing Tackle,” even—and, boy, did this sound like an ill-advised project—“How to Do Dry Cleaning at Home.” “Our aim is to make every item a piece of news,” promised the February 1936 issue, “and to say everything as compactly as possible, giving you the greatest usefulness in the least time and space.” It was a successful formula. By 1938 the magazine had climbed back into the black.
Under Lane's leadership, the company also produced a successful series of how-to home improvement and gardening books, which are still produced today.
[edit] Sunset at War
Sunset’s hard-won self-confidence buoyed it during the early days of World War II. Admittedly, the magazine at first treated the conflict as if it were a temporary irritation, a boorish intruder at a garden party. Asked an advertisement for Sunset’s books: “When your gardener goes to war … when cook and maid find work in defense plants … when there is just no outside help to be had. What then? If you are one of the knowing West Coast families you will solve many of your household problems by putting these three Sunset books to work for you.”
Soon it mobilized. It visited newly minted aviation cadets at the Santa Ana Army Air Base, probing a topic that must have preyed on the minds of many wartime mothers. “Your boy has a new set of parents for the moment. Are they taking good care of him? How about his food?” The reassuring answer: “That there’s health and good spirit in this Army’s foods is proved in the appearance of the men.” Indeed, the magazine grew so hell-bent-for-leather that a simple 1942 article on beekeeping became a ringing defense of the American way of life: “In one small hive you have some forty to eighty thousand little animals that, without reason or thought, maintain a completely organized and regimented society. The individual is without rights. All of the bees’ industry is planned for the survival and economy of the hive. Although interesting to study, this semi-fascist state is by no means a human Utopia. Close observation of the workings of the community will leave you loving democracy more than ever!”
Sunset scored a signal wartime triumph in its garden coverage. Aware that the federal government’s victory garden tips did not always fit Western soils and climates, magazine editors planted their own 1-acre test plot near UC Berkeley. Throughout the war this garden inspired detailed, invaluable articles that helped Sunset readers coax the most from their own patriotic plots.
As war clouds lifted, Sunset looked ahead to peace—with series like Blueprints of Tomorrow, in which architects including Portland’s Pietro Belluschi and Los Angeles’s Harwell Hamilton Harris presented innovative plans for homes to be built once the war was won. In 1943, Sunset devised a new motto: “The Magazine of Western Living.” With V-J Day, Sunset and the West were ready to live.
When Lane took over the magazine, the population of the West was booming. A few years later, the end of World War II brought an explosion of newcomers. Drawing on his experience from the East Coast-serving Better Homes and Gardens, he guessed correctly that these new Westerners would be hungry for information about how to travel, cook, cultivate, and build in their new environment.
[edit] Building Sunset headquarters
For its first five decades, Sunset was a city dweller, crammed into various San Francisco office buildings, but a magazine that spent so much time tilling soil required a permanent garden; a magazine that spent so much time at the stove required expansive kitchens. The Lanes located property in Menlo Park, California, 25 miles south of San Francisco. The 7-acre parcel was a remnant of a 19th-century estate owned by the Hopkins family. Mark Hopkins had made his fortune in the Central and Southern Pacific railroads, and so, in a way, Sunset was returning to its railroad roots.
Its new headquarters was designed by Cliff May, reigning king of the ranch-style house, whose designs had been showcased in Sunset for two decades. May created a long, low, adobe homestead that rambled around a central courtyard. It looked—still looks—both modern and as if it had been transported to its site by time machine from the California of the vaqueros. Step outside and you enter a Thomas Dolliver Church garden, where valley oaks shade a lawn smooth enough to bounce a quarter on; behind that a garden path duplicates in miniature a journey up the Pacific Coast, from the cactus of the Southern California desert to the firs of the Pacific Northwest. (It draws thousands of visitors each year.) For a while Sunset referred to its headquarters as the Laboratory of Western Living. Its test kitchen processes thousands of recipes a year. The test garden puts plant through their paces to ensure they’re worthy of readers’ time and money.
More broadly, Sunset’s new home was a success because it responded to the changes sweeping the West, which was becoming a suburban region, a land of malls, freeways, and three-bedroom ranch houses from the San Fernando Valley to Puget Sound. Sunset had a head start reporting on, advising on, this brave new world.
Many great artists have been attracted to Sunset's tried and tested source of information. Artists such as, Jack London and Georgia O'keefe contributed their western visions in Sunset back in their day. Today a mogol like Martha Stewart knows a "good thing" when she find it. She created her magazine after visiting Sunset in Menlo Park. Smart people know Sunset is a reliable, resource guide, with over a 100 years of influence and knowlege of The BEST OF THE WEST. It's topics cover food, travel, architecture, gardens, and interior design.
[edit] The Time Warner era
Lane Publishing sold Sunset Magazine and books to Time Warner in 1990, and the company was renamed Sunset Publishing Corporation. In 2001, Time Warner reorganized Sunset to be part of recently acquired Southern Progress Corporation, best known for its similar home and lifestyle magazine Southern Living (its similarity to Sunset is no coincidence; its founders came out West to see how the Lanes did it in the early ’60s).
The franchise was beginning to feel long in the tooth in the ’90s, and when Katie Tamony took over as editor-in-chief in 2001; the notion that had become too prevalent amongst its most prized demographic, Western new homeowners, was that Sunset was their mom's magazine, not theirs. They now had many newer, more fresh-looking choices in this lifestyle magazine genre, with titles such as Martha Stewart Living and Real Simple raising the visual bar. Great, useful content was no longer enough, and after an initial "refreshening"of the magazine didn't go far enough (although it did, thankfully, bring back the look of the classic logo), Tamony collaborated with new creative director Mia Daminato (former creative director for Australian-based Federal Publishing Company's Magazine Group) on the current, generally well-received, design.
[edit] Famous architects, causes
Since 1957, Sunset’s Western Home Awards program, cosponsored by the American Institute of Architects, has introduced readers to works by Richard Neutra, Charles Moore, and Frank Gehry, among other notables.
Environmental reporting is a Sunset tradition that dates back to the magazine’s early years. It has helped shape the debate on natural treasures as far afield as the Mojave Desert and the Tongass National Forest. The West’s national parks have been a particular passion. Sunset helped midwife their birth, and it has called attention to their woes, including the overcrowding their popularity brings. Occasionally it has sounded an environmental alarm, as it did with its pioneering 1969 article demanding a ban on DDT. More often Sunset is a quieter, evenhanded voice, showing readers what’s at stake, trusting them to make up their own minds, celebrating places saved for public use, and offering a great deal of information on sustainable building and design.
[edit] Waffle irons and Wild West brides
Sunset has made mistakes. In 100 years it has made some beauts. Former publisher Bill Lane recalled a story run in the 1930s on how to clean waffle irons that should have been headlined “How to Ruin Your Waffle Iron.” “We bought a lot of new waffle irons for readers,” Lane told the magazine. In the early 1950s it printed detailed—but not detailed enough—instructions on how to asphalt your own driveway. At least in company legend, the asphalt didn’t always set properly, and family cars, family pets, and entire Cub Scout packs were mired in black goo, like mastodons at the La Brea Tar Pits, until the magazine hurried a correction into print. As for a notorious bourbon cake, said to be so volatile it caused ovens to explode, though food editors were never able to duplicate that result in the kitchen.
Mostly it gets things right. In fact, Sunset has acquired such a reputation for accuracy readers grant it greater powers than the staff possesses. A few years ago a woman called the Los Angeles office, sighing that her house plant had been felled by a mysterious illness. She held the plant up to her receiver so the staffer could sense its ailing vibrations and diagnose it over the phone. Sunset, alas, wasn’t much help. Nor could it help the man who wrote from England asking the magazine to find him a Wild West bride. Britain, he complained, was short on hearty pioneer gals who could shoot a rifle and rassle a grizzly. He was sure the West had such women, and that Sunset could land him one. It could not.
Sunset has become an icon, it’s shorthand—many real estate classifieds describe property as “a house out of Sunset Magazine.” As an icon, the magazine sometimes falls into bad company when somebody wants to be ironic. In Newton Thornburg’s fine, grim thriller Cutter and Bone, the protagonist, an edgy alcoholic, gets the goods on a corrupt millionaire by pretending to be a Sunset Magazine reporter. Jeff Tweedy name drops the publication in the Wilco song, “A magazine called Sunset.” In the film The Grifters, a larcenous Anjelica Huston flees the Southern California racetrack she’s just fleeced; as she slams shut her car trunk, briefly seen is a Sunset road atlas.
[edit] Editors of Sunset Magazine
There have been 11 editors of Sunset in its 108 years:
- E. H. Woodham
- Charles Field
- Joseph Henry Jackson
- Lou Richardson
- Genevieve Callahan
- William Nichols
- Walter Doty
- Proctor Mellquist
- William Marken
- Rosalie Muller Wright
- Katie Tamony
[edit] External links
- Sunset Magazine website [1]
