A Companion to the History of the Book (77 page)

The periodical was central to the democratic and national struggles that would dominate the next two centuries. For Jürgen Habermas (1991), in the absence of freedom, a critically reasoning, bourgeois, political public sphere emerged from the literary: above all, through journals, as both forums and subjects of discussion in homes and new sites of sociability. Benedict Anderson (1983) suggests that the simultaneous reading of newspapers, made possible by the combination of print capitalism and linguistic diversity, provided far-flung individuals with a concrete experience of belonging to the imagined community of the nation. Paul Starr, countering deterministic notions of technology or capitalism, has emphasized how “constitutive, political decisions” (2004: 3) regarding intellectual property, civil liberties, and systems of communication and transportation shaped the modern media and allowed the republican United States to become the precocious and continuing leader.

The century between Waterloo and Versailles commercialized, popularized, and professionalized the periodical. Publishers and governments, traditionally oriented toward elites, came to view popular reading – like nationalism and primary education – as a force more profitably harnessed than suppressed. With its unprecedented demand for volume and speed, the periodical rather than the book forced the innovation of production methods and trade practices. In 1814, König’s steam-powered, flatbed-cylinder machine printed all 4,000 copies of
The Times
of London overnight. By 1896, a Hoe rotary press could print and fold 96,000 eight-page issues of Pulitzer’s
New York World
(circulation nearly 1.5 million) in one hour, from stereotype plates, on rolls of pulp paper running at 32.5 miles per hour. The elimination of technological, juridical, and economic obstacles to the mass circulation of literary commodities rendered periodicals ubiquitous, increasingly cheap, and eventually colorful.

Already in 1826, Michael Faraday found the output of scientific periodical literature overwhelming. The signal development, however, was the rise of alternatives to elite newspapers and reviews, in two waves of popularization: the appearance of penny newspapers and weeklies around 1830, and the advent of the sensationalistic “new” or “American” journalism of Pulitzer and Hearst and their European imitators around 1880 (Harmsworth, Millaud). They coincided, respectively, with populist pressures and the introduction of mass schooling in the era of anti-revolutionary stabilization and national integration. The number of US journals rose from about 100 in 1825 to 3,300 by 1885, and newspapers from 200 in 1801 to 7,000 in 1880. In Britain, there were 267 newspapers in 1821 and 2,504 by 1914. Russian-language periodicals numbered 170 in 1860 and 606 in 1900. Inexpensive newspapers and monthly or weekly magazines provided multigenerational audiences with news, scandal, entertainment, practical information, fiction, and a dose of reformism, along with growing amounts of advertising and illustration. They were the textual equivalent of department stores: urban, democratic, commercial institutions that appealed to women, reshaped markets as well as consumption, and aroused similar anxieties.

Paradoxically, democratization reinforced hierarchy, establishing a periodical great chain of being descending from lofty quarterlies
(Edinburgh Review
1802,
North American Review
1815), via “high-quality” illustrateds
(Scribner’s Magazine
1887,
Strand
1891), related family publications
(Harper’s Weekly
1857,
Gartenlaube
1853), and cheap, mass-circulation magazines
(Munsey’s
1889,
Collier’s
1888) to fare for the newly or semi-literate
(Tit-Bits
1881). Russians distinguished between monthly “thick journals” and illustrated weekly “thin magazines” – the appetite for which newspapers whetted rather than spoiled. Renewed debate on the periodical focused less on the quantity of reading matter than the quality of reading practices among a mass public figured as feminine and lower class.

All strata consumed serialized fiction, in part-publications inspired by the success of
The Pickwick Papers
(1836–7), in new family magazines, and (on the continent) in the
feuilleton
or non-political portion of the newspaper (one thinks of Verne, Thackeray, Dumas, Trollope, Conan Doyle). Some theories attempt to explain the appeal of serial literature by opposing “female” fiction to “male” nonfiction or positing complementary rhythms of textual pleasure (goal-oriented male installments within the periodicity of feminine delayed gratification). Certainly, the tangible benefits of the
ménage à trois
between author, publisher, and reader were clear. When Eugène
Sues Juif Errant
ran in 169
feuilletons
in the
Constitutionnel
(1844–5), it boosted sales from 5,944 to 24,771 and earned him 100,000 francs.

The key to cheap print was advertising income, which allowed publishers to sell below cost. The appearance and character of periodicals changed accordingly. Between 1908 and 1913, advertising space in the
Saturday Evening Post,
that juggernaut of bourgeois socialization, occupied 35–50 percent of a given issue, and advertising revenues grew by 600 percent, leading the Curtis Corporation to proclaim that its ostentatious new headquarters was “built on faith – faith in the power of advertising” (Cohn 1989: 64). Even as a feminist press emerged, mainstream publishers increasingly targeted women as consumers.

Commercialization fostered journalistic sensationalism and sobriety alike. Sensationalism (like bolder “American” design) compensated for the inherent redundancy of event-based content whose increasing blandness derived from shared wire services (Havas 1835, Wolff 1849, Reuters 1851) and pools (Associated Press 1848, United Press 1907), as well as the political reserve prompted by new ideals of journalistic “objectivity” and the triangulated cultivation of readers, stockholders, and advertisers. A profit-driven press emphasizing reporting replaced a crudely partisan one in the US in the 1830s, Britain by mid-century, and Japan in the 1880s. Critics pointed in vain to the spurious separation of editorial from commercial concerns.

Controversy assumed forms appropriate to the environment of public opinion (“jingoism,” “muckraking”). Periodicals turned the Dreyfus case into “The Affair” that affirmed the power of the press and public intellectuals. One unintended consequence was the Tour de France (1903), a promotional device for a cycling magazine formed by arch-conservatives (including Michelin) who seceded from another over its Dreyfusard politics and advertising prices. Sales increased tenfold to over 250,000 by 1908. The simultaneous circulation of the bicycles, periodicals, and products they advertised epitomized the intimate and uneasy intermingling of the worlds of goods and ideas.

Consumerism, conflict, and consolidation in the era of the two world wars and the Cold War produced both the greatest efflorescence of, and threats to, periodical culture. On the one hand, periodicals embodied and celebrated the commercialization of leisure. Henry Luce’s information and photojournalistic magazines
(Time
1923,
Life
1936) and their imitators satisfied the needs of a visually literate middlebrow public accustomed to a fast-paced life and desirous of being informed and modern but not overly intellectual or unconventional. On the other hand, periodicals continued to serve as artillery and fortresses (to use popular nineteenth-century metaphors) in political and cultural wars, as mass media met mass politics.

Both the Nazis and the Soviets sought to create new human types and societies and rejected a free, heterogeneous literary market, although with different rationales and consequences. Pursuing historical debates on overproduction to a draconian conclusion, the Nazis eliminated ideologically acceptable as well as subversive publications. What political “coordination” began, “total war” finished: by 1944, the number of journals had sunk from some 7,300 to 500, and the number of newspapers from 4,100 to 977. Enhanced diffusion of periodicals abroad was the goal of the equally draconian national switchover from “Gothic” to roman letters (1941), preposterously justified as another blow against malevolent Jewish influence. The Nazis sought to tame a nation of readers; the Bolsheviks, to create one. The latter viewed increasing literacy (21 percent in 1897) and publication, like industrial production, as measures of revolutionary success. Unable to allow either a traditional elite or a new but autonomous popular culture, they created the “Soviet reading ‘myth’ ”: a nation of voracious readers united through print by socialist values (Lovell 2000: 21). By the 1960s, the USSR produced some 6,800 periodicals in 60 languages with a circulation of 61 million, including 602 daily newspapers (c. 50 in 1913). This hothouse diversity was to be both the cause and proof of social cohesion, but neither long survived communism itself.

After 1945, the victorious Allies presided over an unprecedented rebuilding of the publishing landscape equivalent to the renewal of devastated cities: a simultaneous loss and opportunity. Although the toll of “totalitarian” dictatorship of right and left was obvious, capitalist democracy proved harsh in its own way. Concentration, which began in the late nineteenth century (Scripps, Hearst, Harmsworth), accelerated and spread. Competition declined. Both the cookie-cutter of communism and the gentle but relentless kneading of the capitalist invisible hand shaped what to many appeared as an increasingly homogeneous product. Put another way:
Der Spiegel
(1947) and
India Today
(1975) look like
Time
for the same reason that Frankfurt and Mumbai look like Chicago.

Precocious or analogous developments such as the Roman
acta diurna,
Chinese
ti pao,
or Mughal manuscript newsletters notwithstanding, the periodical was a modern European invention, a “civilian tool of Western empire-building” (Reed 2004: 10) that non-Westerners came to employ for their own ends. It shaped languages, created canons, and forged identities along a broad spectrum of responses: neither mere imitation nor negation of Western values, nationalism, or technology. Where cultural resistance to the letterpress book or commercialization was strong, periodicals sometimes eased the introduction of print culture. Middle Eastern modernizers such as Faris al-Shidyaq proselytized for the new technology as the means of overcoming backwardness while preserving and democratizing the scribal legacy. His
al-Jawa’ib,
the first nongovernmental Arabic paper (Constantinople 1861) became a forum for nationalist cultural revival. In China, lithography, thanks to its low cost and closeness to traditional aesthetics, served as a “compromise technology” (Reed 2004: 89). Illustrated newspaper supplements and journals were the bridge between indigenous woodblock printing and the high-speed industrialized letterpress required for modern news periodicals that flourished after the Sino-Japanese war.

In the Western hemisphere, where the first news-sheet was published in Spanish in Mexico in 1541, local vernaculars never seriously challenged the dominance of colonial languages in print. India, by contrast, developed what Vinay Dharwadker calls “the first fully formed print culture to appear outside Europe and North America … distinguished by its size, productivity, and multilingual and multinational constitution, as well as … its inclusion of numerous non-Western investors and producers” (1997: 112). The rich print culture (including 14,000 nineteenth-century periodicals in forty languages) may even have forestalled the violence that accompanied other colonial struggles. The rise of nationalist movements was inextricably linked with periodicals: a fourfold increase in circulation of Bengali newspapers from 1883 to 1888, a quadrupling of Egyptian papers between 1892 and 1899 (and nearly thirty women’s periodicals founded 1892–1920), and 474 Ottoman periodicals published in various languages following the Young Turk revolution in 1908.

The periodical flourished because it offered all the agents of the communications circuit distinct advantages: for publishers, financial calculability and a means of recruitment and publicity; for authors, regular income and exposure; for readers, affordable diversity of content. Periodicity allowed for continual intellectual or material response, whose virtual intimacy compensated for the anonymity of the market. Growing commercialization and scale of operations wrought changes in that relationship as well as the genre.

Johann Friedrich Cotta pioneered the integrated enterprise, offering high fees for contributions to an unparalleled complex of periodicals. His political and literary newspapers
Allgemeine Zeitung
(1798) and
Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände
(1807) relentlessly promoted his book catalogue, especially lucrative editions by luminaries such as Schiller and Goethe, won via journal contracts. Other publishers attached their names to flagship publications
(Blackwood’s, Harper’s, Scribner’s, Westermann’s).
Complexity and profitability grew hand-in-hand. By 1912, “A single edition of either the
Ladies’ Home Journal
or the
Saturday Evening Post
consumed four square miles of paper and 60,000 pounds of ink and required sixty-five railway cars to distribute it” (Cohn 1989: 64). The British press barons used revenues from cheap magazines to subsidize still cheaper newspapers. The printer–publisher–retailer thus evolved into a “pure” publisher and sometimes manager of a multifaceted concern, which was to its forerunner as the railroad was to the textile mill: a network rather than single locus of activity, often requiring public ownership rather than family capital.

The understandable scholarly emphasis on books has distorted our view of authorship. Periodicals fostered the rise of professional writers, incidental writers, and professionals who wrote. A journal’s title and the collective reputations of its established authors spread an umbrella of provisional credibility over its new writers. The birth of the periodical coincided with what Foucault (1984) controversially identifies as an epochal reversal in the author function, whereby scientific discourses came to be judged on their merits, and literary discourses required attribution to a named creator. Dieter Paul Baumert (1928) suggests a further differentiation of aesthetic and informational roles. He discerns a sort of bell curve of the authorial persona in journalism, as the dominant activity evolved from mere compilation in the pioneering phase, to individualized literary shaping of material in the Enlightenment and Romantic eras, and editorial selection and arrangement after 1848. As the profile of the average journalist receded, elite contributions (bylines,
feuilletons)
stood out all the more by comparison.