Tag Archives: Good Housekeeping

The Top 10 Magazine Covers of Winter 1923

It’s been a while since I’ve done a magazine cover post, and last time I was kind of snarky, so I decided to set out in search of the top 10 magazine covers of January and February 1923.

Except that it was really hot outside (I’m in Cape Town), and I wasn’t feeling all that energetic, so I thought maybe ChatGPT could find them for me.

In other words, do your own blog post, I’m too busy writing term papers!

Feeling slightly chastened, I set out on my search.

I started out with a round of disqualifications, beginning with covers that reused illustrations that had originally appeared elsewhere. This led me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out whether the Jessie Willcox Smith illustration from Little Women that appears on the cover of the February 1923 issue of Good Housekeeping is from the edition of the book that she illustrated. I tentatively decided that it isn’t.

I had an even harder time figuring out the provenance of Smith’s January 1923 cover featuring Hans Brinker. Irritated, I summarily disqualified Smith. I was looking for edgier covers in any case.

Next to go was the February Ladies’ Home Journal cover, which turned out to be a painting by French artist Gabriel Émile Edouard Nicolet, who died in 1921.

Then I eliminated covers that gave me the creeps, regardless of their artistic merit.

Ditto, covers with guns,

especially covers with babies with guns.

Next up are the covers that captured my interest for reasons other than the quality of the art, like this one from Fruit, Garden and Home, which, fascinatingly, turns out to be the original name of Better Homes and Gardens, from its founding in 1922 until August 1924, when sanity prevailed and the magazine was renamed.

And this one from Popular Mechanics, illustrating an article called “Down Popocatepetl on a Straw Mat.” As someone who rode up Popocatepetl (a volcano outside Mexico City) in a car and struggled to walk up a tiny bit of it, I have a great deal of admiration for anyone who accomplished this.*

And this intriguing cover illustrating the article “Stopped by a Pencil” in Personal Efficiency magazine. What the heck is going on here? A metaphor for bureaucracy? An actual giant pencil on the rampage? Sadly, Personal Efficiency is not available online, so I’ll never know.

And now for the Top 10! Ranking them was a challenge, not for the usual “it was so hard to decide, everyone deserved to win” reason but because of the lack of standouts. Most of the covers struck me as deserving to be ranked #5. Here’s what I came up with, after a lot of hemming and hawing.

10. Popular Science, January 1923, artist unknown

I toyed with the idea of relegating this cover to the same category as the giant pencil, but it’s just too cool. I mean, it’s a monster new airship that will carry passengers across the continent! Called the San Francisco Express! Okay, it might be a dubious bit of futurology at a time when transatlantic airplane flights had already taken place,** but still…cool!

9. Shadowland, February 1923, A. M. Hopfmuller.

I can never figure out what exactly is going on in A.M. Hopfmuller’s Shadowland covers, but I’ll miss them when the magazine ceases publication in November 1923.

8. Vanity Fair, February 1923, Anne Harriet Fish

I’m a fan of Fish’s Vanity Fair covers, and this one might have ranked more highly if I could figure what exactly was going on. A woman is looking through store receipts??? and is crying??? or holding another receipt up to her face??? while her husband smokes nonchalantly??? Or something??? Plus, what’s the deal with that chair?

7. Vogue, George Wolfe Plank, February 1, 1923

This cover, of a woman feeding a sugar cube to a dragon, is done with Plank’s usual artistry, but it just didn’t particularly grab me the way some of his other covers did.***

6. Saturday Evening Post, Coles Phillips, February 17, 1923

My love for Coles Phillips knows no bounds, and I’m always happy to see him pop up, but the Saturday Evening Post’s limited color palate doesn’t play to his strengths.

5. McCall’s, January 1923, Neysa McMein

I’m normally more of a fan of Neysa McMein as a fascinating 1920s figure (salon hostess, suffragist, Dorothy Parker’s best friend, etc.) than as an artist, but there’s something that haunts me about this woman. “Who are you?” I keep asking myself. “And what’s wrong?”

4. The Crisis, February 1923, Louis Portlock

I’m not familiar with Louis Portlock and I couldn’t find out anything about him except for one other cover for The Crisis, from 1922. I like the simplicity of this illustration.

3. Harper’s Bazar, January 1923, Erté.

Erté’s never not brilliant, but, as with Plank, I wouldn’t say he was at his best here.****

2. Motor, January 1923, Howard Chandler Christy

I was struck by this Motor cover, although I can’t figure out what’s going on in the lower left corner, where the woman’s dress seems to turn into a wall, or something. I didn’t think I was familiar with Christy, but it turns out that he was the artist behind some of the most famous World War I recruiting posters, like this one:

1. The Liberator, January 1923, Frank Walts

I almost disqualified this Liberator cover because I featured it with other New Year’s covers in last month’s top posts of 1922 post, but that just seemed unfair, especially given the lack of top-quality covers.***** It wasn’t a shoo-in for #1, but I like the simple artistry.

Even though I wasn’t wowed by this batch of covers, I had fun seeing what some of my favorite artists were up to, discovering a few new ones, and pondering the mystery of the giant pencil. In retrospect, I’m glad ChatGPT wasn’t up to the task.

*Although I have more admiration for the Mexican guy steering with the stick than for the the guy holding on for dear life in the back, who I assume is the writer of the article.

**If, like me until recently, you thought Charles Lindbergh was the first person to fly across the Atlantic, he was just the first person to do it SOLO. British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown made the first transatlantic flight in 1919.

***Like this one

George Wolfe Plank, Vogue, June 15, 1921

and this one,

for example.

****As opposed to here

Erté Harper's Bazar cover, February 1918, masked woman looking out window at man. — Erté, February 1918

and here.

*****J.C. Leyendecker’s Saturday Evening Post cover was disqualified, though, because it came out on December 30. Besides, it was confusing.

Summer 1921 Magazine Covers, Viewed Longingly from Wintery Cape Town

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Objectively speaking, winter in Cape Town is not all that bad. The temperature rarely dips below the high 40s, and a cold day is one when it doesn’t make it into the 60s. Subjectively speaking, though, winter in Cape Town is miserable. It rains a lot, and houses don’t have central heating, so we sit around freezing and grumbling.*

What I needed to improve my mood, I decided, was some summer fun from the covers of 1921 magazines. I could pretend I was somewhere hot, hanging around at the beach**

J.C. Leyendecker Saturday Evening Post cover, July 2, 1921, toddler with bucket. — J.C. Leyendecker

or the pool

or fishing

or playing golf

or camping

or basking in the moonlight

or canoodling

or cavorting about in the altogether,

or just hanging around,

maybe at the summer house.

Margaret Harper August 1921 House & Garden cover, country house aerial view. — Margaret Harper

Henry George Brandt June 1021 House & Garden cover, window of cottage with flowers. — Henry George Brandt

(Okay, these are not all ACTUAL wishes. I’m not much of a fisherman, for example.)

Lo and behold, I did actually make it to the northern hemisphere in time for the last few weeks of the summer. It turns out, though, that my image of Washington in August was a teeny bit romanticized. Life has been more like this

and this

than this.

But I’ve had a great time hanging out with my friends,

and even though I haven’t spent much (okay, any) time working on my manuscript

I swear that’s going to happen before the fall sets in.

But fall is weeks away, so let’s not think about it right now. After all, in the words of the #1 hit song of late summer 1921, “In the meantime, in between time…”

*Of course, I always keep in mind how fortunate I am compared to most people in Cape Town.

**If we were rerunning the Best Magazine Cover of a Woman Swimming with a Red Scarf on Her Head competition, we’d have some good contenders here.

New On The Book List:

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie

The Best and Worst Magazine Ads of January 1921

1915/1920 Magazine Cover Smackdown: And the Winners Are…

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The people have spoken! And the people, it turns out, like athletic, adventurous women and hate scantily clad women.

Let’s back up a minute. In case you haven’t been following along, in my last blog post I asked the people to vote on whether 14 magazines (and two mismatched pairs) had better covers in 1915 or 1920. This was in the context of me being a 1920 crank going on about how things were better in the 1910s. But enough with the explanation…you can check it out yourself.

On to the winners:

1. Vogue

Helen Dryden, September 15, 1915

Helen Dryden, September 1, 1920

This is the first of several matchups where an artist faces off against him/herself. Dryden is a favorite of mine, previously featured in my posts on Ten 1919 Illustrators I’m Thankful For and Five Inspiring Women of 1919. The winner, which also got my vote, is Dryden’s colorful 1915 cover, which bested her uncharacteristically subdued 1920 cover with 58% of the vote.

2. Harper’s Bazar

Erte Harper's Bazar cover, September 1915, three women

Erté, September 1915

Erté Harper's Bazar cover, September 1920

Erté, September 1920

Another self-matchup, Erté vs. Erté.* This was inevitable, because Erté, who was one of the Ten 1918 People I’m Thankful For, was Harper’s Bazar’s regular cover artist from 1915 to 1936. I’m thankful that I have a decade and a half of his illustrations to look forward to, but his October 1920 cover wasn’t one of my favorites. Readers agreed, with the 1915 cover winning 59% of the vote.

3. Ladies’ Home Journal

Ladies' Home Journal cover, September 1915, Lester Ralph, woman sitting on naval mine.

Lester Ralph, September 1915

Walter Biggs, September 1920

This boring vs. weird matchup featured Leslie Ralph’s woman sitting on what looks like a German naval mine vs. Walter Biggs’ popular parasol-carrying woman. I was of two minds here but ended up going for the 1920 cover because at least no one was about to blow up. Readers are made of sterner stuff than I am, though, and the 1915 cover won 71% of the vote.

4. Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair cover, September 1915, Rita Senger, woman with sleeping Pierrot.

Rita Senger, September 1915

Warren David Vanity Fair cover, September 1920, naked women dancing.

Warren Davis, September 1920

Rita Senger’s 1915 Vanity Fair cover is my favorite of the bunch, winning my enthusiastic vote against Warren Davis’ frolicking naked women. I admired the first Warren Davis cover I saw, way back toward the beginning of this blog, but I soured on him when I learned that drawing naked women was the only thing he ever did. Readers shared my taste, giving Senger a lopsided 91% victory.

5. The Crisis

The Crisis, September 1920, photo of bust by C. Matey.

Sculpture by C. Matey, September 1915

The Crisis, September 1915, The Colonel of the 8th Regiment.

Unknown artist, September 1920

I was disappointed that both of these covers featured photographs, as opposed to, say, a Frank Walts drawing or a William Edouard Scott painting. I voted, with mixed feelings, for the 1920 cover featuring a sculpture by the mysterious (or, at least, not easily Googleable) C. Matey, which led the polls with 57% of the vote.

6. St. Nicholas

St. Nicholas cover, September 1915, Charles Livingston Bull, children sailing.

Charles Livingston Bull, September 1920

St. Nicholas magazine cover, September 1915, Norman Price, motorcycle stunts.

Norman Price, September 1915

If I could jump into one of these covers, Mary Poppins-style, I’d definitely opt for sailing over watching dangerous motorcycle escapades (both of which apparently require a necktie). But as a cover I went for the eye-popping red and the action of the 1915 cover. I was in a minority here; 55% chose sailing.

7. Cosmopolitan

Harrison Fisher, September 1915

Cosmopolitan cover, September 1920, Harrison Fisher, woman drinking tea with dog.

Harrison Fisher, September 1920

A Harrison Fisher vs. Harrison Fisher faceoff, with similar young-woman-drinking-something themes. The one with the dog (title: “You Beauty!”) struck me as a bit unsanitary, so (putting aside my resentment over just happening upon it after spending an hour searching for images of women drinking through straws for my Are You H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan’s Ideal Woman? quiz) I went with the 1915 cover. 62% of readers agreed.

8. Good Housekeeping

Good Housekeeping cover, September 1920, Coles Phillips fadeaway girl.

Coles Phillips, September 1915

Good Housekeeping cover, Jesse Wilcox Smith, September 1920, little girls hugging in doorway.

Jessie Willcox Smith, September 1920

As I’ve repeatedly mentioned, I adore Coles Phillips, who was Good Housekeeping’s sole cover illustrator for a two-year stretch in the 1910s.** If I had known about him two years ago, My Sad Search for 1918 Love might have ended differently. I don’t adore Jessie Willcox Smith, who was at the vanguard of the cutesification of magazine art (although I do adore her illustration from At the Back of the North Wind featured in the 1919 children’s books holiday shopping guide and her Good Housekeeping New Year’s 1918 cover). 83% of voters agreed with me.***

9. The Masses/The Liberator

The Masses cover, September 1920, Cornelia Barnes, children dancing near organ grinder.

Cornelia Barnes, September 1915

The Liberator, September 1920, Hugo Gellert, boy on flying horse.

Hugo Gellert, September 1920

As I noted in my previous post, The Liberator arose in the ashes of The Masses, which closed after staff members were charged with conspiring to obstruct conscription. I’m a fan of Cornelia Barns, who drew a proto-New Yorker cartoon I loved, and an even bigger fan of Hugo Gellert and his wonderful covers for The Liberator (including its inaugural issue). This isn’t my favorite Gellert, though, and I ended up voting for Barnes. 57% of voters agreed.

10. The Smart Set

Smart Set cover, September 1915, John Held Jr., man in polo clothes with woman.

John Held Jr., September 1915

Smart Set cover, September 1920, Archie Gunn, man and woman on boat.

Archie Gunn, September 1920

The Smart Set is one of the few magazines where what’s inside is consistently better than what’s on the cover. I did like John Held Jr.’s cheery 1915 polo cover; less so the people in the boat who you just know are racist. A lopsided 86% of readers agreed.

11. Photoplay

Photoplay cover, September 1915, Mary Pickford.

Unknown illustrator, September 1915

Photoplay cover, September 1920, Rolf Armstrong, Constance Talmadge.

Rolf Armstrong, September 1920

Movie star vs. movie star. I could have gone for either one of these, and in choosing the 1920 cover I was perhaps slightly biased by my fondness for Rolf Armstrong, although this isn’t one of my favorites.**** I was in the minority here, with 55% of readers choosing the 1915 cover by an unknown illustrator. (I originally credited the 1915 illustration to Anita Stewart, who, an alert reader pointed out, is actually the subject. Kicking myself!)

12. La Vie Parisienne

La Vie Parisienne cover, September 25, 1915, woman shooting arrow.

Unknown artist, September 25, 1915

La Vie Parisienne, September 18, 1920, woman playing golf with caddy.

Unknown artist, September 18, 1920

I lucked out in having two La Vie Parisienne covers that are suitable for a family blog. I prefer the clear lines of the 1915 archer, and so did a whopping 90% of readers.

13. Life

Emery, September 8, 1915

Rea Irvin, September 23, 1920

I’m a big fan of future New Yorker illustrator Rea Irvin, but not so much of his 1920 Life cover (although it bears closer scrutiny since the picture seems to be embroidered). I have no idea who Emery is, but his or her whimsical take on hat fashions is a lot of fun. 76% of readers agreed.

14. Saturday Evening Post

Charles Livingston Bull, September 18, 1915

Saturday Evening post cover, September 25, 1920, Alfred E. Orr, man painting name on mailbox.

Alfred E. Orr, September 25, 1920

I had second thoughts about some of my choices, none more than this one. I voted for Alfred E. Orr’s man painting a mailbox when clearly the correct choice is Charles Livingston Bull’s owl. A consequential choice, since there was a dead heat here.

15. Metropolitan

Metropolitan cover, September 1920, Edna Crompton, woman serving at tennis.

Edna Crompton, September 1920

Metropolitan cover, September 1915, young woman in straw hat.

Unknown artist, September 1915

Despite my 1910s leanings, I’m not blind to the ways that the 1920s are better, including more women being portrayed as being physically active as opposed to standing around with their clothes falling off. 90% of readers agreed.

16. The Best of the Rest

Red Cross cover, September 1920, Gerrit Beneker, worker in front of skyline.

Gerrit Beneker, September 1920

Golfers magazine, September 1920, man swinging golf club while woman watches.

Unknown artist, September 1915

For the last matchup, I paired up two covers that didn’t have a counterpart in the other year but that I couldn’t bear to leave out. My favorite, and that of 75% of readers, was Gerrit Beneker’s 1920 builder on the cover of Red Cross (the magazine’s second to last issue).

And the winning cover is…

Rita Senger, September 1915

I’m new at this polling business, and if I had it to do again (which I no doubt will, given how much fun it was this time) I would allow everyone to vote for their favorite cover of all. As it is, I’ll have to go with the cover that had the highest vote percentage. This isn’t really fair because it may just reflect the weakness of the competition, but so be it.

All caveats aside, I’m delighted to announce that the winner is Rita Senger’s wonderful Vanity Fair cover, which, as noted, is also my favorite. It edged out the 1915 La Vie Parisienne cover by a few tenths of a percentage point. Next time I write about illustrators I love, I’m going to write about Senger.

And the winning year is…

J.C Leyendecker

1915 was the overwhelming winner, beating out 1920 in twelve of the matchups, with three victories for 1920 and one tie. Interestingly, given that it was my grousing about the decline of magazine illustration that spurred the contest, I voted for 1920 six times, twice as often as the average reader.

So it’s been officially, objectively proven: the 1910s rule!

And the winning reader is…

…Allison Silberberg, who has received a free copy of Deborah Kalb’s wonderful middle-grade novel George Washington and the Return of the Magic Hat. Allison’s favorite cover is the Red Cross “The Builder” cover, which makes a lot of sense given the former Alexandria, Virginia, mayor’s commitment to building communities. You can find Allison on Facebook here and on Twitter here.

And the winning new (to me) blogging technology is…

Readership during the week the Magazine Cover Smackdown was published shattered previous records, even when taking into account some iffy botlike behavior on the day before publication. So clearly readers like polls! Judging from the low number of votes as a percentage of views, though, readers are not as fond of voting in polls as they are of reading them.

That’s fine! It’s just a blog poll! It’s not like the future of America is at stake!

Which is not something that can be said for the other election that’s going on right now. So, as we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage,***** make sure to

League of Women Voters poster, 1920

*Estimated amount of time that I have spent over the course of this blog putting the accent mark in Erté’s name (or, rather, pseudonym): two hours.

**For more Fadeaway Girls, check out my Pinterest board.

***Not that I’m judging you 17 percenters. In fairness to Smith, this is a beautifully illustrated cover—I love the green doors and the shadows.

****That’s Armstrong’s Metropolitan cover on the blog banner, unless you’re reading this in the future when I have updated the banner, in which case here’s the old one, featuring 1919 covers. It was a thing of beauty (future me says), and I miss it so much!

*****Of course, it would take decades more of struggle before African-American men and women’s right to vote was fully honored throughout the country.

You Be the Judge: The 1915/1920 Magazine Cover Smackdown

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An occupational hazard of reading as if you were living a hundred years ago is that you start turning into a curmudgeon. “Things were so much better in the 1910s,” you (okay: I) grumble on a regular basis, apropos of 1920. Not everything, of course—the 1910s had the war and the Spanish influenza, for starters, and with starters like that there’s no point racking your brain for additional examples. But some things definitely got worse.

The font at The Smart Set, for example. What were H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan thinking?

Smart Set, August 1919

Smart Set, August 1920

Dorothy Parker was fired from Vanity Fair in January 1920, so good-bye to her theater reviews

Excerpt from Dorothy Parker theater review, Vanity Fair, August 1919

“The First Shows of Summer,” Vanity Fair, August 1919

and hate poems.

From "Our Office: A Hate Poem," Dorothy Parker, Vanity Fair

“Our Office: A Hate Poem,” Vanity Fair, May 1919

And then there are the magazine covers. Every time I’ve thought about doing a magazine cover post in the last few months, I’ve found some dispiriting examples,

thought wistfully about the good old days,*

Crisis cover, April 1918, Willian Edouard Scott, black couple on wagon.

William Edouard Scott

Helen Dryden

Erté

and given up.

I wondered sometimes whether I was being fair. Maybe, like so many people, I was longing for a golden age that only existed in my mind. But how to measure such a thing?

And then inspiration struck. The magazines could duke it out, mano a mano, 1920 vs. the 1910s. I chose 1915 as the opponent, a nice round number but not so far back that it’s super-old-timey like this 1910 Ladies’ Home Journal cover:

As I assembled the covers, it dawned on me that maybe I still wasn’t being fair. What was to stop me from picking all the 1915 covers to prove a point? I pondered this for a while, and then the answer came to me: the people!

Normally, I’m very limited as to what I can do on this blog because I’m a wordpress.com member, meaning that WordPress hosts my blog as well as being the platform for designing it, as opposed to the far cooler wordpress.org members, whose blogs are hosted by other companies so they can get all sorts of plug-ins that don’t run on wordpress.com.** But one thing that wordpress.com lets you do now is run polls. And what’s more fun than a poll?***

So I leave it to you, the people, to decide, for each of the 16 magazines below, whether its September 1915 cover (top) or its September 1920 cover (bottom) is better. (In several cases, as it turns out, artists are competing against themselves.) The polls will stay open for a week, and the winners will be announced in early October. If the covers I’m rooting for don’t win, I promise to accept your verdict graciously. Because that’s what democracy is all about!

And, in case you find your energy flagging, there’s a prize at the end.

1. Vogue

Helen Dryden, September 15, 1915

Helen Dryden, September 1, 1920

2. Harper’s Bazar

Erté

3. Ladies’ Home Journal

Lester Ralph

Walter Biggs

4. Vanity Fair

Rita Senger

Warren Davis

5. The Crisis

Sculpture by C. Matey

6. St. Nicholas

Norman Price

Charles Livingston Bull

7. Cosmopolitan

Harrison Fisher

8. Good Housekeeping

Coles Phillips

Jessie Willcox Smith

9. The Masses/The Liberator****

Cornelia Barnes

Hugo Gellert

10. The Smart Set

John Held Jr.

Smart Set cover, September 1920, man talking to woman on boat.

Archie Gunn*****

11. Photoplay

Rolf Armstrong

12. La Vie Parisienne

13. Life

Emery

Rea Irvin

14. Saturday Evening Post

Charles Livingston Bull

Alfred E. Orr

15. Metropolitan

Edna Crompton

16. The Best of the Rest

There were two covers that didn’t have a counterpart in the other year but that were too good to leave out, so I’ll let them face off.

Gerrit Beneker

That’s it, the hard work of voting is over. Now for the prize!

My friend and fellow blogger Deborah Kalb’s book Thomas Jefferson and the Return of the Magic Hat is being published this week. It’s the third in a series of books about the adventures of a group of fifth-grade friends who travel back in time and meet America’s founding presidents. The first three readers who let me know which magazine cover was their favorite will receive a free copy. You can post a comment below or drop me a line through the Contact page.******

I’ve read the book and highly recommend it—it’s a lot of fun but at the same time it engages seriously with the issue of slavery. As the U.S. prepares to choose its next president, the timing couldn’t be better. So hurry up and vote!

*I know, apples and oranges. But I’m describing a mental state, so bear with me.

**Like PUTTING PHOTOS SIDE BY SIDE, FOR EXAMPLE, WORDPRESS!

***Besides a quiz, I mean.

****The Masses, a socialist monthly, ceased publication in 1917 after editor Max Eastman and several staff members were charged with conspiring to obstruct conscription. Eastman and his sister Chrystal Eastman founded The Liberator in 1918.

*****Which I am very proud to tell you I deciphered from this:

******For readers living outside the United States, I’ll do my best to get a copy to you, but I can’t make any promises.

Thursday Miscellany: Mauvais français, trippy Kewpies, and loud loos

The best and worst of February 1918: Magazines, stories, cover art, and jokes

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Two months into My Year in 1918, I feel like I used to feel two months into a Foreign Service posting: completely at home in some ways but totally bewildered in others. I know who Viscount Morley was*, and which author every critic trots out to bemoan the sad state of fiction**, but there are references that go right over my head. Who is Baron Munchausen? What is Fletcherizing? And the jokes. I’ll never get the jokes.

Best magazine: The Crisis

Banner reading Negro Education by W.E.B. DuBois with illustrations of women reading, The Crisis, 1918.

The Crisis, February 1918

This is a repeat, but no other magazine approaches The Crisis in terms of quality of writing and importance of subject matter. Aside from W.E.B. Du Bois’ autobiographical essay, which I wrote about last week on the 150^th anniversary of his birth, the February issue includes Du Bois’ scathing take-down of a government-sponsored study on “Negro Education” that advocated the replacement of higher education institutions with manual, industrial, and educational training. There’s a horrifying account of the mob murder of an African-American man in Dyersburg, Tennessee—so brutal, the magazine reports, that some white townspeople felt he should have had a “decent lynching.” On the literary side, there’s “Leonora’s Conversion,” a slight but engaging story about a wealthy young black woman’s brief flirtation with the church.

I’m not awarding a Worst Magazine this month. Good Housekeeping was a contender again—dialect-talking black maid Mirandy has the month off, but Japanese manservant Hashimura Togo*** expounds on his employer’s marital problems in equally fractured English. (“‘You have left off kissing me as usually,’ she dib. ‘O.’ He march and deliver slight lip.”) The magazine redeems itself somewhat, though, with an article by suffragist Anna Kelton Wiley called “Why We Picketed the White House.”

Good Housekeeping, February 1918

Best short story: “A Sordid Story,” by J., The Egoist

February wasn’t a great month for short stories. Most of the ones I read, including two that made it into The Best American Short Stories of 1918, started out promisingly but ended with pathos or a gimmicky twist. “A Sordid Story,” in the January**** Egoist, isn’t great literature, but it has daring subject matter and lots of atmosphere. It features a Cambridge student named Alphonse, whose life is described in the most British sentence I’ve ever read:

He made friends easily and took friendship seriously; so seriously that he spent nearly the whole of the Michaelmas term following the taking of his degree in reading Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and The Gospel according to St. Luke in the Greek with a much younger man—a certain Roderick Gregory—who was in his second year, but had hitherto failed to pass his Little-Go.

Photograph of Cambridge University by Maxwell Armfield, Cambridge and Its History, 1912.

Maxwell Armfield, from “Cambridge and its History,” 1912

Alphonse falls for Roderick’s sister Beatrice, who “used to have a pet pig, and she called him Shakespeare, because he would be Bacon after his death.” But he spends the night with a working-class girl who grabs his arm as he’s walking near Midsummer Common and says, giggling, “Can yer tell me what o’clock it is?” Horrified with himself the next day, he goes back to her lodgings to pay her off. She tells him that he was her first lover, then, when he tells her it’s over, says, “Yer weren’t the first, then!” Relieved “not to be the first to help send a woman downward,” he goes back to his rooms, where Roderick is playing the cello and twenty-five copies of the Quarterly Journal of Mathematics, in which he has published a paper, await him. It’s only years later that he figures out that he was, in fact, the first.

Worst short story: “A Verdict in the Air,” J.A. Waldron, Judge

Lawrence Fellows illustration, Judge magazine, 1918, man standing near airplanes.

Lawrence Fellows, Judge, February 9, 1918

Harwood, on leave from aviation training, goes to a cabaret in Chicago. To his surprise, one of the singers is his childhood sweetheart Bessie Dean, who left their Ohio hometown to pursue a career in opera. She introduces Harwood to her husband Grindel, who takes a dislike to him. A few days later, Harwood is training on the Pacific Coast, when who should show up as a mechanic but Grindel! Harwood has a series of flying accidents, and Grindel is suspected, but he goes AWOL. Harwood is sent to fight with the French army. He visits a friend at a field hospital, where the nurse is none other than Bessie, who has escaped her husband. Back at the front, there’s a heated battle. Harwood pursues the last remaining German plane and hits its rudder after a lively skirmish. As the plane plunges to the ground, he sees that the pilot is—you guessed it—Grindel!

Well, the illustration is kind of cool.

Best magazine covers:

February was a great month for magazine covers. I just wish that the insides of the magazines were half as good. Besides the ones from Harper’s Bazar and Vanity Fair that I’ve mentioned already, there’s this Helen Dryden cover from Vogue,

Helen Dryden Vogue cover, February 1918, woman in pink hoop skirt looking into mirror.

Helen Dryden, February 1918

and this one, which Norman Rockwell sold to Judge after the Saturday Evening Post turned it down. I can kind of see why.

Norman Rockwell Judge magazine cover, girl grabbing tartan skirt from brother dressed as a Scottish soldier.

Norman Rockwell, Judge, February 9, 1918

Best joke:

This isn’t exactly a joke, but it made me laugh. It’s the opening of Louis Untermeyer’s review of poetry collections by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Samuel Roth, and Edwin Curran in the February 14 issue of The Dial.

These three first volumes, with their curious kinship and even more curious contrasts, furnish a variety of themes. They offer material for several essays: on “What Constitutes Rapture”; on “The Desire of the Moth for the Star”; on “The Growing Tendency among Certain Publishers to Ask One Dollar and Fifty Cents for Seventy Pages of Verse”; on “A Bill for the Conservation of Conservative Poetry”; on “Life, Literature, and the Last Analysis”; on “Why a Poet Should Never be Educated.”

Studio photograph of Louis Untermeyer, ca. 1910-1915.

Louis Untermeyer, ca. 1910-1915, Library of Congress

The Growing Tendency among Certain Publishers to Ask One Dollar and Fifty Cents for Seventy Pages of Verse! That Louis Untermeyer is such a card!

Not amused? Okay, then, you go back to 1918 and try to find something funnier.

Worst joke:

Judge magazine banner, With the College Wits, February 9, 1918.

Judge magazine, February 9, 1918

Once again, hard to choose. Maybe this, from the February 9 issue of Judge:

“You don’t—know me, do you, Bobby?” asked a lady who had recently been baptized.
“Sure I do,” piped the youth. “You’re the lady what went in swimming with the preacher, last Sunday.”

On to March!

*A British diplomat

**Mrs. Humphrey Ward

***Really Wallace Irwin, who made a career of writing about Togo. Mark Twain was a fan.

****I was reading The Egoist a month late on the principle that it would have taken time for the magazine to get to the United States, which I’ve since decided is ridiculous.

The bonkers world of Marie Corelli

My Life 100 Years Ago

A journey back in time