September 1897 issue |
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| Editor | John T. Elduff |
|---|---|
| Frequency | Weekly |
| Founder | Peter F. Collier |
| First issue | 1888 |
| Final issue | 1957 |
| Country | United States |
| Based in | Berwyn, Pennsylvania |
| Language | English |
| Website | colliersmagazine.com |
| ISSN | 2161-6469 |
Collier's Weekly was an American magazine founded by Peter Fenelon Collier and published from 1888 to 1957. With the passage of decades, the title was shortened to Collier's.
As a result of Peter Collier's pioneering investigative journalism, Collier's Weekly established a reputation as a proponent of social reform. When attempts by various companies to sue Collier ended in failure, other magazines became involved in what Theodore Roosevelt described as "muckraking journalism." In 2010, the Collier's trademark was purchased by JTE Multimedia, which plans to resurrect the brand.[1]
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Irish immigrant Peter F. Collier (1849–1909) left Ireland at age 17. Although he went to a seminary to become a priest, he instead started work as a salesman for P. J. Kennedy, publisher of books for the Roman Catholic market and the paternal grandfather of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. When Collier wanted to boost sales by offering books on a subscription plan, it led to a disagreement with Kennedy, so Collier left to start his own subscription service. P.F. Collier & Son began in 1875, expanding into the largest subscription house in America with sales of 30 million books during the 1900-1910 decade.[2]
In April 1888, Collier's Once a Week was launched as a magazine of "fiction, fact, sensation, wit, humor, news". By 1892, with a circulation climbing past the 250,000 mark, Collier's Once a Week was one of the largest selling magazines in the United States. The name was changed to Collier's Weekly: An Illustrated Journal in 1895. With an emphasis on news, the magazine became a leading exponent of the halftone news picture. To fully exploit the new technology, Peter Collier recruited James H. Hare, one of the pioneers of photojournalism. Collier's only son, Robert J. Collier became a full partner in 1898. By 1914, it was known as Collier's: The National Weekly.
Peter Collier died in 1909, and Robert Collier died in 1918, leaving a will that turned the magazine over to three of his friends: Samuel Dunn, Harry Payne Whitney and Francis Patrick Garvan.
The magazine was sold in 1919 to the Crowell Publishing Company (which in 1939 was renamed as Crowell-Collier Publishing Company).[3]
Printing of the magazine was done at the Crowell-Collier printing plant on West Main Street in Springfield, Ohio. The factory complex, which is still standing, was built between 1899 and 1946, and incorporates seven buildings that together have more than 846,000 square feet (78,600 m2) — 20 acres (81,000 m2) — of floor space.
When Norman Hapgood became editor of Collier's Weekly in 1903, he attracted many leading writers. In May 1906, he commissioned Jack London to cover the San Francisco earthquake, a report accompanied by 16 pages of pictures. Under Hapgood's guidance, Collier's Weekly began publishing the work of investigative journalists such as Samuel Hopkins Adams, Ray Stannard Baker, C.P. Connolly and Ida Tarbell. Hapgood's approach had great impact, resulting in such changes as the reform of the child labor laws, slum clearance and women's suffrage. In April 1905, an article by Upton Sinclair, "Is Chicago Meat Clean?", persuaded the Senate to pass the 1906 Meat Inspection Act.
Starting October 7, 1905, Adams startled readers with "The Great American Fraud," an 11-part Collier's series. Analyzing the contents of popular patent medicines, Adams pointed out that the companies producing these medicines were making false claims about their products and some were health hazards. Hapgood launched the series with the following editorial:
"The Great American Fraud" had a powerful impact and led to the first Pure Food and Drug Act (1906). The entire series was reprinted by the American Medical Association in a book, The Great American Fraud, which sold 500,000 copies at 50 cents each.
Hapgood had a huge influence on public opinion, and between 1909 and 1912, he succeeded in doubling the circulation of Collier's from a half million to a million. When he moved on to Harper's Weekly in 1912, he was replaced as editor for the next couple years by Robert J. Collier, the son of the founder.
Writers such as Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, who reported on the Spanish Civil War, helped boost the circulation. Winston Churchill, who wrote an account of the First World War, was a regular contributor during the 1930s, but his series of articles ended in 1938 when he became a minister in the British government. Other writers included Willa Cather, Zane Grey, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Carl Fick, Henry L. Jackson, Cornelius Ryan, J. D. Salinger, Ruth Burr Sanborn, Kurt Vonnegut, Albert Payson Terhune, Walter Tevis, Rob Wagner and H. C. Witwer.[4] Arthur H. Vandenberg, later to become a prominent Senator, had a brief stint as a Collier's editor during the 1900s.
Collier's circulation battle with The Saturday Evening Post led to the creation of The Collier Hour "The Magazine of the Air," broadcast on the NBC Blue Network from 1927 to 1932. It was radio's first major dramatic anthology series, adapting stories and serials from Collier's. Airing on the Wednesday before weekly publication, it later switched to Sundays to avoid spoilers with stories being aired simultaneously with the magazine.
In 1929, in addition to the dramatizations, it offered music, news, sports and comedy.
Serializing novels during the late 1920s, Collier's Weekly sometimes simultaneously ran two ten-part novels, and non-fiction was also serialized. Between 1913 and 1949, Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu serials, illustrated by Joseph Clement Coll and others, were hugely popular. The first three Fu Manchu novels by Rohmer were actually compilations of 29 short stories that Rohmer wrote for Collier’s.
The Mask of Fu Manchu, which was adapted into a 1932 film and a 1951 Wally Wood comic book, was first published as a 12-part Collier's serial, running from May 7 to July 23, 1932. The May 7 issue displayed a memorable cover illustration by famed maskmaker Władysław T. Benda, and his mask design for that cover was repeated by many other illustrators in subsequent adaptations and reprints.[2]
Leading illustrators contributed to Collier's, including Chesley Bonestell,[5][6] Howard Chandler Christy, Harrison Fisher, James Montgomery Flagg, Robert Fawcett, Denver Gillen, Percy Leason, J. C. Leyendecker, Paul Martin, John Alan Maxwell, John Cullen Murphy, Frederic Remington, John Sloan, Charles Henry "Bill" Sykes and Frederic Dorr Steele.
The magazine's roster of top cartoonists included Charles Addams, Carl Anderson, Stan and Jan Berenstain, Sam Berman, Sam Cobean, A. B. Frost, Dave Gerard, Vernon Grant, Jay Irving, Crockett Johnson, E. W. Kemble, Hank Ketcham, George Lichty, David Low, Bill Mauldin, Virgil Partch, Mischa Richter, William Steig, Richard Taylor, Gluyas Williams, Gahan Wilson and Rowland B. Wilson.
Kate Osann's Tizzy cartoons first appeared in Collier's. The redheaded Tizzy was a teenage American girl who wore horn-rimmed glasses with triangular lenses. Tizzy was syndicated by NEA after Collier's folded. The cartoons were in color in Collier's but black-and-white in syndication and paperback reprints.
In 1903, Charles Dana Gibson signed a $100,000 contract, agreeing to deliver 100 pictures (at $1000 each) during the next four years. From 1904 to 1910, Maxfield Parrish was under exclusive contract to Collier's, which published his famed Arabian Nights paintings in 1906-07. After WWII, Harry Devlin became the top editorial cartoonist at Collier's, one of the few publications then displaying editorial cartoons in full color. During the 1940s, Gurney Williams was the cartoon editor for Collier's, American Magazine and Woman's Home Companion, paying $40 to $150 for each cartoon. From a staggering stack of some 2000 submissions each week, Williams made a weekly selection of 30 to 50 cartoons, lamenting:
Joseph Barbera, before he found fame in animation, had several cartoons published in Collier's in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
During World War II, with William L. Chenery as the editor (1941),[8] Collier's readership reached 2.5 million. In the October 14, 1944, issue, the magazine published one of the first articles about concentration camps, Jan Karski's "Polish Death Camp," a harrowing account of his visit to Belzec. Collier's carried that excerpt from Karski's Story of a Secret State a month-and-a-half prior to the book's publication by Houghton Mifflin. A Book of the Month Club selection, Karski's book became a bestseller, with 400,000 copies sold in 1944-45. The Collier's selection was reprinted in Robert H. Abzug's America Views the Holocaust: 1933-1945 (Palgrave, 1999).
Collier's had a circulation of 2,846,052 when Walter Davenport took over as editor in 1946, but the magazine began to lose readers during the post-World War II years. Collier's published long awaited images from the 200-inch (5.08 m) Hale telescope's first light in 1949.[9] In the early 1950s, Collier's ran a groundbreaking series of articles about space flight, Man Will Conquer Space Soon! which prompted the general public to seriously consider the possibility of a trip to the moon. In 1951 an entire issue described the events and outcome of a hypothetical war between the United States and the Soviet Union, entitled Preview of the War We Do Not Want. Collier's changed from a weekly to a biweekly in August 1953, but it continued to lose money. The magazine ceased publication with the issue dated January 4, 1957.
A huge history and collection of material from the magazine appeared with the publication of the 558-page A Cavalcade of Collier's, edited by Kenneth McArdle (Barnes, 1959).
In the 1950s the company expanded into broadcasting, purchasing the San Francisco Bay Area station KLX for $750,000 from its original owners, the Tribune Publishing Company of Oakland, which had founded the station three decades earlier. Eventually, Crowell-Collier owned three Top 40 stations: KFWB (Los Angeles), KDWB (Minneapolis) and KEWB (Oakland-San Francisco). Crowell-Collier sold KEWB to Metromedia Radio in April 1966 for nearly $2.5 million, and the station then became KNEW.
Hollywood's KFWB had been the top AM radio station in Southern California during the late 1950s and early 60's, but it was late catching up to current music trends such as the British Invasion and lost market share to other stations such as KHJ which switched formats to rock and roll. KFWB was sold to Westinghouse in 1966 for what was then a record price for a radio station -$10 million.
On December 13, 2010, John Elduff, Managing Director of JTE Multimedia, purchased the rights to the Collier's trademark. JTE Multimedia, which is headquartered in Berwyn, Pennsylvania plans to resurrect the Collier's brand with a combination of investigative and political reporting, coverage of the global economy, and letters.[10]