Blue Book

I tend to divide Blue Book ’s life into five periods. The first was its unillustrated, “Stageland” period, which ran for the first ten years from 1905-14. Then there was its more formative ‘pulp’ period which took up the next thirteen years, 1915-27. Then comes what I think of as Blue Book ’s ‘golden age’ from 1928-40, followed by the ‘mature years’ from 1941-51, when its major editor, Donald Kennicott, retired. Then there are its final years as a men’s ‘adventure’ magazine from 1952-56. In this survey I ignore the final incarnation of the magazine, as Bluebook for Men , when it was revived in 1960 and ran to, at least, 1975. That came from a different publisher and was a very different magazine that is best forgotten. Blue Book was founded by Chicago businessman and entrepreneur Louis Eckstein (1865-1935). He had already issued Red Book in May 1903 and would later launch Green Book in January 1909. Curiously, at the outset Blue Book ’s title didn’t follow the pattern. It began life as The Monthly Story Magazine , which made clear the distinction between itself and Red Book . Though both were the standard magazine size of the day — 6½ x 10 inches – and running to a substantial 192 pages, Red Book was published on good quality coated stock. It ran a wide range of features as well as stories, was highly illustrated and contained a significant amount of advertising. The Monthly Story Book was, with one exception, all fiction and carried no illustrations and limited advertising. It was published on pulp paper; not the usual thick low quality woodpulp but a better quality, which I tend to think of as closer to book paper. It’s quite thin and unfortunately does not age well so these early issues are brittle. The one exception was a heavily illustrated thirty-page feature published on top quality coated stock and which opened each issue. This was “Stageland”. At this period several popular magazines, in both the United States and Britain, found it beneficial to link themselves with the theatre, much as today many magazines have film or tv tie-in features. “Stageland” consisted of photos from the main stage plays of the day and, starting in December 1906, there was also a theatre review section at the back of the magazine, run by Charles Darnton. The phrase “Stageland” featured at the top of the front cover on every issue, so much so that I have known some people think that that was the magazine’s name. So popular was the feature that within a couple of years the magazine also included a free “color supplement” immediately inside the front cover portraying what amounted to the “actress of the month”. The covers were also far removed from any identity with an action, all-thrills pulp magazine. They featured a demure portrait of a woman in the fashion of the day, just as did Red Book . Painted by Gustavus Widney, James Albert Lane and others, these portraits suggested a magazine looking back more to the 1890s than the twentieth century. In fact the whole atmosphere of both Red Book and The Monthly Story Magazine , was related more to the standard popular magazines like Harper’s and Scribner’s than to the other popular fiction pulp magazines like The Argosy or The Popular , both of which grew out of the dime novel tradition. This gave The Monthly Story Magazine an aura of sophistication that was somehow missing from the rival pulps, a sophistication that it retained even in its most die-hard pulp days of the mid-thirties. There was the added element of detachment that Monthly Story was published in Chicago and not in the capital of the pulps, New York. I don’t know how much this affected distribution, indeed it may have helped it, as by 1909, Blue Book was reporting a circulation of 200,000. Nevertheless there was clearly a trend emerging rapidly at the time that The Monthly Story Magazine appeared. Its first issue was dated May 1905 and appeared on the stalls on 1st April. Just a few months earlier the first issue of The All-Story