Magazines that Make History

MAGAZINES THAT

MAKE HISTORY: Their Origins, Development,

and Influence. By Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva. Univ. Press of Florida.

407 pp. $45

The Internet is the Shirley Temple of modern media, the hugely talented new prodigy that’s conquering the world. It sings! It dances! It lets you watch Icelandic TV! Suddenly, the popular media of the last century seem passé. Magazines in particular have taken on a Norma Desmond air. There they sit on the newsstands, crying out for attention and love, but they’re printed on paper, the poor dears, and static as stones. Though traditional magazines are still thriving as businesses—indeed, making a lot more money than their Internet counterparts—they no longer seem fresh or exciting.

Luckily, there are still some who recall the glories of the magazine past and believe in the medium’s power. Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva, longtime magazine journalists based, respectively, in Buenos Aires and New York, spent five years putting together this vibrant chronicle of eight great magazines of the 20th century: Time, Der Spiegel, Life, Paris Match, National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, ¡Hola!, and People.

At first, the lineup looks startlingly disparate—what could National Geographic and the Spanish celebrity fanzine ¡Hola! possibly have in common?—but as you move through the artfully reconstructed stories of their origins and growth, it becomes clear that the magazines share a great deal. Many of them were born of a very personal vision, a fever dream that seized the imaginations of one or two tenacious individuals. DeWitt Wallace, the founder of Reader’s Digest, was so taken with the notion of condensing other publications that, while recovering from serious combat injuries suffered in World War I, he pored over old articles and practiced boiling down their contents. Those magazines that didn’t begin as obsessive personal quests effectively became just that under driven, visionary editors. Rudolf Augstein, Der Spiegel’s legendary guiding spirit, occasionally rewrote articles after they had been published, just to demonstrate to his staff how they should have read.

Another motif here is the role played by serendipity and pure accident. When Charles Lindbergh made his solo transatlantic flight in May 1927, Time didn’t see that he’d instantly become a popular hero, and left him off the cover. Seven months later, as the year ended and the editors faced the usual holiday dearth of news, somebody had a neat idea: Why not fix the oversight by giving Lindbergh the cover and touting him as “The Man of the Year”?

National Geographic debuted in 1888 as a scholarly magazine of exploration, mostly made up of dense text. One day in 1904, editor Gilbert Gros­venor was faced with a printer’s deadline and 11 empty pages. Some Rus­sian explorers had sent him stunning photos they’d taken of the Tibetan city of Lhasa, a place few in the West had ever glimpsed. Desperate, he threw them into the magazine, worried that he’d be fired for this shocking departure from form. The rest is his­tory—literally.

The life stories of these magazines are also the biography of our times, told affectionately by two men who obviously adore magazines and the way they capture our collective life. What’s encouraging is that the story isn’t over yet. All eight of these titles are still alive (the only one that actually died, Life, keeps getting resurrected), and the book goes into great detail on the art and craft that allow them to be reborn on a weekly or monthly basis. At one point, former People editor Richard Stolley explains that a celebrity news story is often a play in three acts: the rise, the fall, and the redemption. Someday, one hopes, the same will be said for the miraculous old medium we foolishly take for granted.

—William Powers