NEW YORK, NY.- Reflecting the broad spectrum of American culture, printed magazines from the 18th through the 21st centuries have both driven and documented the American experience. The Grolier Club’s winter exhibition, Magazines and the American Experience, lays out a chronological history of periodical print media in the United States, highlighting specific genres, topics and events using approximately 200 rare and unique magazine issues. The Grolier Club is presenting the exhibition physically in its ground floor hall from January 20 through April 24, 2021, and has made an online version available.

In the colonial era, magazines were the clarions of American thought and identity; the first successful magazine from the 18th century proudly proclaimed itself as The American Magazine in 1744 and the first printed statement of American independence appeared in The Pennsylvania Magazine in June 1776.

As magazine publication expanded in both number and scope, they fostered the development of distinct communities of Americans by creating extensive networks of communication between people who otherwise would not have been in contact with one another. In studying their development, we learn the histories of the American farmers and tradesmen; women and children; poets, humorists, and artisans, reformers and religious groups of every denomination and ethnicity. Periodical publications continue today to remain a valuable and irreplaceable primary source of information about the American experience.

Co-curated by Grolier member and collector Steven Lomazow, M.D., and fellow Grolierite and freelance cataloguer and librarian Julie Carlsen, the exhibition is arranged in two sections. The first presents a chronological history of American culture in magazines from the 18th to the 21st centuries. The second celebrates the broad spectrum of specific genres including cases devoted to great American artists and humorists, the progress of Black culture and equality, a salute to our national game of baseball, and the development of radio, television and motion pictures.

The accompanying exhibition catalog is an important source of publishing history and a tribute to this significant American art form. It includes a series of essays on the history of American magazines as well as studies of specific genres, written by leading experts in their field. The book is illustrated with over 400 color images of the first issues and highlights of the most important periodicals in American history. The catalog is available at the Grolier Club for $75.

Dr. Steven Lomazow has been collecting American periodicals since 1972 and has authored books, blogs and catalogs on the subject. His collection is widely recognized as the finest magazine collection in private hands.

The many highlights of the exhibition include:

• Some of the earliest magazines printed in America: colonial magazines, early political cartoons, and two of the four contemporary magazine printings of the United States Constitution.

• First printings of formative works by major American authors, including Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” Walt Whitman’s first published short story, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes, and Ernest Hemingway’s first literary contribution in his Oak Park, Illinois, high school magazine.




• Civil-War era publications that highlight the breadth of the American political spectrum: Abolitionist, Colonizations, Confederate, Democratic, Copperhead, Nativist, Republican, and Whig.

• First issues of virtually every important American magazine, to mention but a few: Cosmopolitan, Ebony, Essence, Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, People, Playboy, Scientific American, Scribner’s, Seventeen, Time, and Vogue.

• Highlights from Dr. Lomazow’s “United We Stand” WWII collection, including a magazine printed by and for the homeless community.

• Some of the more major and formative magazines of the 20th century: the first issue of Rolling Stone; The Berkeley Barb; the second issue of One, the first magazine devoted to the LBGTQ community; Byte, the first popular magazine devoted to computers; and the first issue of Apple’s Macworld, featuring the irrepressible Steve Jobs.

• Landmark magazines that shaped the American woman’s experience: the first magazine in America targeted exclusively to women, published in 1792, The Lowell Offering, created and published by women employed in the Lowell fabric mills; magazines edited by the revolutionary Sarah Josepha Hale (the first identified female editor of an American magazine); the first issue of the progressive Women’s Words from 1877; the preview issue of Gloria Steinem’s Ms.

• A significant collection of magazines created by and for the Black community, including one of two known copies of Mirror of Liberty, the first magazine edited by an African-American; Frederick Douglass’ abolitionist Douglass Monthly; one of three known copies of the Harlem Renaissance magazine Fire!! signed by its contributors; notable issues of the magazine of the NAACP, The Crisis; and intriguing unique survivals like The Harlemite.

• Iconic magazine art from the 20th century: Norman Rockwell’s first Saturday Evening Post Cover; centerfold illustrations after Thomas Nast and Winslow Homer from Harper’s Weekly; Andy Warhol’s Interview, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin.

• Rare and many never-before-exhibited film, radio, and television periodicals, including notable early contributions by Hugo Gernsback; covers featuring leading actors and actresses from the golden age of American cinema; and the first issue of TV Guide.

• A trove of early American humor magazines, dime novels, and illustrated pulp magazines.

• Baseball magazines chronicling the history of the sport: the rules of the game as first printed in a magazine; the engraving of a baseball game at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, the first image of the sport in an American periodical; and contemporary covers featuring major players whose careers began in the Negro leagues.