Image Archaeology--Images within Images Department, 1934

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 978

This short post comes in the can’t-judge-a-book-by-its-cover category, as the cover is absolutely the  most interesting component of this publication.  Unless of course you’re interested in knowing how many paid subscribers Liberty had in Asheville, North Carolina in 1934.  Or Salida, Colorado.

That’s all there is to the innards of this pamphlet: circulation numbers for a prancing, popular magazine.  This would’ve been of great concern to the folks trying to sell and distribute Liberty, showing potential customers how far and wide the magazine was read. (And evidently it was very popular:  with a circulation per issue of about 2.2 million, it was the sixth most popularly-read magazine in the country, following Collier’s, McCall’s, Ladies Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post, all of which had circulations between 2.3 and 2.9 million, so Liberty was not far off from being one of the most widely-circulated magazines in the country. It actually rose to the number two spot for a little while during the war.) 

 
This is not to say that the magazine itself was a bore, what with writers like P. G. Wodehouse,  Robert Benchley,  Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert W. Chambers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Murray Leinster,  Sax Rohmer and others making contributions here and there. 

An odd bit about Liberty—they “timed” their articles.  The reader was told about how long, on average, it would take to read each piece, taking about three hours to read the entire issue.  That’s something I’ve never seen before. 

So the contents turned out to be a bit of a bore—the cover, on the other hand, is just lovely, a beautiful and seamless piece of photo montage with some interesting semi-hidden images. I quite like the image of the white-shirt-tie magazine stand purveyor that emerges from the shadows (above). And also the face that emerges from underneath the rear brim of the boater on the fellow standing in front of the stand.

 

This is just a lovely example of what ephemeral play one can draw from an unexpected source.

Comments

[Jeff Donlan]

So ... how many subscribers were from Salida, Colorado? I will guess ... four.

[John F. Ptak]

And the answer is....86! 114 in Chaffe County, so the great majority of LIBERTY readers were in your town. 22,000 subscriptions in the state, or about 2% of the folks in the state subscribed (CO has a 1.2 million pop in 1940).