Tuesday 31 August 2010

Saturday Evening Post


For seven decades this magazine was America’s greatest showcase for the art of illustration. The minutiae of daily life in town and country was transformed into an enduring mythology of a nation united in deeply rooted family values and comradely good fellowship by highly skilled cover artists who each week looked America in the eye and saw that it was good. J C Leyendecker, Stevan Dohanos, John Falter, Constantin Alajolov and the arch-sentimentalist, Norman Rockwell maintained an undeviating focus on the positive and excluded all but the most trivial of contemporary anxieties from their vision.


The Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia published, printed and dispatched this weekly ration of short stories, movie and sports celebrities, popular journalism, conservative politics and consumer advertising direct into millions of American homes. The multi-colour packaging, the magazine cover, was produced on the rotary presses shown in the above postcard. The card immediately below illustrates the colour press room of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Below that we have the Edwardian plush of the Women’s Rest Room and the subscription and sales departments.




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