History

Rise

The Saturday Evening Post was first published in 1821 in the same printing shop at 53 Market Street in Philadelphia where the Benjamin Franklin-founded Pennsylvania Gazette had been published in the 18th century. While the Gazette ceased publication in 1800, ten years after Franklin's death, the Post links its history to the original magazine.

Heyday

The Post grew to become the most widely circulated weekly magazine in America. The magazine gained prominent status under the leadership of its longtime editor George Horace Lorimer (1899–1937).

The Saturday Evening Post published current event articles, editorials, human interest pieces, humor, illustrations, a letter column, poetry (with contributions submitted by readers), single-panel gag cartoons (including Hazel by Ted Key) and stories by the leading writers of the time. It was known for commissioning lavish illustrations and original works of fiction. Illustrations were featured on the cover and embedded in stories and advertising. Some Post illustrations continue to be reproduced as posters or prints, especially those by Norman Rockwell. In 1954 it published its first articles on the role of the US in deposing Mohammad Mosaddegh, Prime Minister of Iran, in 1953. The article was based on materials leaked by CIA director Allen Dulles.

Decline

The Post readership began to decline in the late 1950s and 1960s. In general, the decline of general interest magazines was blamed on television, which competed for advertisers and readers' attention. The Post had problems retaining readers: the public's taste in fiction was changing, and the Post's conservative politics and values appealed to a declining number of people. Content by popular writers became harder to obtain. Prominent authors drifted away to newer magazines offering more money and status. As a result, the Post published more articles on current events and cut costs by replacing illustrations with photographs for covers and advertisements.

Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts

The magazine's publisher, Curtis Publishing Company, lost a landmark defamation suit, Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts 388 U.S. 130 (1967), resulting from an article, and was ordered to pay U.S.$3,060,000 in damages to the plaintiff. The Post article implied that football coaches Paul "Bear" Bryant and Wally Butts conspired to fix a game between the University of Alabama and the University of Georgia. Both coaches sued Curtis Publishing Co. for defamation, each initially asking for $10 million. Bryant eventually settled for $300,000, while Butts' case went to the Supreme Court, which held that libel damages may be recoverable (in this instance against a news organization) when the injured party is a non-public official, if the plaintiff can prove that the defendant was guilty of a reckless lack of professional standards when examining allegations for reasonable credibility. (Butts was eventually awarded $460,000.)

William Emerson was promoted to editor-in-chief in 1965 and remained in the position until the magazine's demise in 1969.

Closure

In 1968, Martin Ackerman, a specialist in troubled firms, became president of Curtis after lending it $5 million. Although at first he said there were no plans to shut down the magazine, soon he halved its circulation, purportedly in an attempt to increase the quality of the audience, and then subsequently did shut it down. In announcing that the February 8, 1969, issue would be the magazine's last, Curtis executive Martin Ackerman stated that the magazine had lost $5 million in 1968 and would lose a projected $3 million in 1969. In a meeting with employees after the magazine's closure had been announced, Emerson thanked the staff for their professional work and promised "to stay here and see that everyone finds a job".

At a March 1969 post-mortem on the magazine's closing, Emerson stated that The Post "was a damn good vehicle for advertising" with competitive renewal rates and readership reports and expressed what The New York Times called "understandable bitterness" in wishing "that all the one-eyed critics will lose their other eye". Otto Friedrich, the magazine's last managing editor, blamed the death of The Post on Curtis. In his Decline and Fall (Harper & Row, 1970), an account of the magazine's final years (1962–69), he argued that corporate management was unimaginative and incompetent. Friedrich acknowledges that The Post faced challenges while the tastes of American readers changed over the course of the 1960s, but he insisted that the magazine maintained a standard of good quality and was appreciated by readers.

Reemergence

In 1970, control of the debilitated Curtis Publishing Company was acquired from the estate of Cyrus Curtis by Indianapolis industrialist Beurt SerVaas. SerVaas relaunched the Post the following year on a quarterly basis as a kind of nostalgia magazine.

In early 1982, ownership of the Post was transferred to the Benjamin Franklin Literary and Medical Society, founded in 1976 by the Post's then-editor, Dr. Corena "Cory" SerVaas (wife of Beurt SerVaas). The magazine's core focus was now health and medicine; indeed, the magazine's website originally noted that the "credibility of The Saturday Evening Post has made it a valuable asset for reaching medical consumers and for helping medical researchers obtain family histories. In the magazine, national health surveys are taken to further current research on topics such as cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, ulcerative colitis, spina bifida, and bipolar disorder." Ownership of the magazine was later transferred to the Saturday Evening Post Society; Dr. SerVaas headed both organizations. The range of topics covered in the magazine's articles is now wide, suitable for a general readership.

By 1991, Curtis Publishing Company had been renamed Curtis International, a subsidiary of SerVaas Inc., and had become an importer of audiovisual equipment. Today the Post is published six times a year by the Saturday Evening Post Society, which claims 501(c)(3) non-profit organization status.

With the January/February 2013 issue, the Post launched a major makeover of the publication, including a new cover design and efforts to increase the magazine's profile, in response to a general public misbelief that it was no longer in existence. The magazine's new logo is an update of a logo it had used beginning in 1942. As of October 2018, the complete archive of the magazine is available online.

The heyday of the Saturday Evening Post is now quite a few years behind us, but the magazine held such a large audience in America that most people are still familiar with it today. Let’s play a little word association: Saturday Evening Post — umm, Norman Rockwell! Yes, that’s right, but there’s so much more to the story of the Post than just Rockwell. There is Curtis and Lorimer and Leyendecker, three names that should at least reign equal with Rockwell’s. We’ll take a look at what each of these names meant to the Post on this page.

The history of the Saturday Evening Post is in itself a tidy history of the magazine in America.

The Saturday Evening Post began in 1821, but as if that didn’t date far enough back to impress you it is claimed that it started up in the same printer’s shop that Ben Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette began in in 1728. Is that American enough for you? Anyway, as collectors we are not all that interested in these early days of the Saturday Evening Post other than as supplemental background information. Where our interest begins to pique is still pretty far back though, in 1897, when Cyrus H.K. Curtis purchased the Post for $1,000.

Cyrus Curtis

Where Curtis’ genius as publisher lay was in his hands-off attitude towards his magazines. He had already implemented this strategy in running his first magazine, the Ladies’ Home Journal. Originally just a column called “Women and the Home” in his newspaper the Tribune and Farmer, the Ladies’ Home Journal became a separate supplement to the paper in December 1883. Curtis’ wife, Louisa Knapp, edited it until her resignation in 1889. That’s when Curtis gave it over to his first editorial all-star, Edward William Bok.

As for the Saturday Evening Post, Curtis was taking over a sinking ship. Ad revenue from the publication was just $7,000 in the year Curtis purchased it. Thirty years later, in 1927, ad revenue would top $50,000,000. Cy Curtis resurrected the Saturday Evening Post and made it both the most read and most beloved magazine in America during the 1920’s and 30’s. But before those successes he needed to find an editor.

George Horace Lorimer was brought in to run the Post while Curtis sailed to Europe in search of his new editor. When Lorimer sent Curtis an issue in order to keep his boss informed of how he was handling things, Curtis realized that he already had his man. George Horace Lorimer would be the editor of the Saturday Evening Post from 1899 through 1936. When he took over the circulation of the Post was just over 2,000 copies. Under Lorimer not only would it be the first magazine with a circulation surpassing 1,000,000 copies, it would push itself over the 3,000,000 mark by the end of his tenure.

What did Lorimer do to cause this amazing turn around? He implemented changes almost immediately. The September 30, 1899 issue would be expanded to 30 pages and for the first time have a separate cover. Previously the cover of the magazine was page 1. Lorimer produced a two-color red and black cover featuring a painting by George Gibbs. By adding a cover Lorimer was also creating three prominent empty pages: the inside of the front cover and both sides of the back cover. These pages were filled with advertising.

Inside the Saturday Evening Post

Advertising would fuel the success of the Saturday Evening Post. The bottom line for magazines in the past had been circulation–getting paid for selling copies. The Post under Curtis sold for just a nickel to boost circulation numbers and then made its real profits on the advertising. By the teens issues would fatten to over 200 pages and would contain up to 60% advertising. That’s how Curtis and Lorimer managed to hit that magic $50,000,000 ad revenue number by the late twenties.

Inside the covers of the Post was fiction targeted at the masses. The fiction of the Saturday Evening Post was not highbrow like The New Yorker or even literary like Harper’s and the Atlantic. It was popular, intended to strike a chord with the most possible people, not the most educated. The magazine would publish fiction by famous writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ring Lardner, and Sinclair Lewis, but the main offerings of the Post were popular pieces by writers who are lesser known today: Albert Payson Terhune, Octavus Roy Cohen, Mary Roberts Rinehart and Clarence Budington Kelland were all short story and serialized regulars in the Post.

Besides it’s fiction the Saturday Evening Post offered feature stories and humor. When founded in the 19th Century the Post proclaimed itself neutral in politics, under Lorimer it would take on the editor’s pro-business, Republican personality.

Probably the main competition of the Post would become Collier’s when it was under William Chenery. Collier’s had been founded in 1888 and survived until 1957. They were a heavily fiction based magazine though they also did some muckraking in their features.

Saturday Evening Post Covers

But where the Saturday Evening Post separated itself from Collier’s and other competitors was by cementing its own identity through those famed covers. At first a lot of the covers would contain an illustration which corresponded in some way to one of the stories or features inside. Lorimer would quickly abandon this strategy and instead select covers which evoked those same masses with whom he was trying to connect the contents to. He let the covers stand out as a representation of the magazine as a whole. Each issue of the Saturday Evening Post was intended from cover to cover and contents included to represent the same America that its readers were living in.

The cover artists are some of the most famous illustrators of the 20th Century. Besides Rockwell there was J.C. Leyendecker, Harrison Fisher, James Montgomery Flagg, Steven Dohanos, Mead Schaffer and many others over the years. This page is intended more as an overview of the Saturday Evening Post as a whole, but those artists will be detailed on another part of the site. Following is just a brief overview of their relationship to the Post.

Prior to Rockwell’s emergence, Leyendecker was the top cover artist at the Post. Leyendecker handled most of the holiday covers from the very beginning, his most famous being his New Year’s covers which began featuring his New Year’s Baby with the December 29, 1906 issue. Over time Leyendecker would be credited with over 300 of the Post’s covers.

Norman Rockwell’s first Post cover was the May 20, 1916 issue. He would be the top cover artist at the Saturday Evening Post for most of the rest of the magazines history, inking his last cover with the May 25, 1963 issue. Rockwell’s style was the narrative illustration, pictures which told a story. Probably his most famous cover was the May 29, 1943 issue featuring Rosie the Riveter. It was Rosie’s only appearance on a Post cover.

Leyendecker and Rockwell were definitely the main cover contributors during the magazines glory years. Between the two of them they were responsible for one-third of all covers during the 1920’s as well as the top two contributors in the 30’s. Rockwell had the credit on the Post’s first four-color cover, February 6, 1926. Leyendecker kept up his holiday covers until his last, January 2, 1943.

The Post in the 1930’s and 40’s

As for the men in charge, the Saturday Evening Post continued to be run by the Curtis Company, but Cyrus Curtis himself died in 1933. George Horace Lorimer stayed on as editor well into the 1930’s, but was severely disappointed both in general and with the Post’s readership by the re-election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. Having run the Post for so many years as a pro-business Republican, Lorimer was disillusioned by the changing times and stepped down as editor at the end of 1936.

Wesley Stout took over with the first issue of 1937. Stout was in a tough position. As was only natural, he wanted to leave his own mark on the Post, but at the same time how could he alter Lorimer’s policies without upsetting the successful magazine? Stout stuck with Leyendecker and Rockwell as cover artists but tried out a host of new illustrators on the issues that weren’t handled by the top pair. Stout also brought the photographic cover back to the Post, using the work of Ivan Dmitri. Even Dmitri’s photographs would bring their own style to the Post, as they were usually close-ups, often snapped from strange angles. Leyendecker and Rockwell would outlast Stout’s tenure.

Issues of the Post had been shrinking since the Depression. Since the size of the magazine was predicated largely upon advertisements it’s quite clear that the shrinking size of the Post meant shrinking ad revenue for the Curtis Company. Stout was out, Ben Hibbs was in. Hibbs would preside over the Post from 1942 through 1961. He quickly changed the logo of the Post. After the War Hibbs selected covers that depicted the American post-war world; this meant lots of cars and views of the suburbs. Family continued to be the key element to which the Post would appeal.

Hibbs tried out new artists as well, but he quickly settled on a few and he stuck with them. During a four year period in the late 1940’s he would use only 16 different cover artists and only half of those would contribute on a regular basis. Besides Rockwell key cover artists under Hibbs were Mead Shaeffer, Steven Dohanos, and Constantin Alajalov. It was also during the 1950’s that Rockwell would begin doing some portrait covers.

The Demise of the Saturday Evening Post

Profits for the Saturday Evening Post fell throughout the 50’s. Hibbs would be replaced in 1961 by Robert Fuoss. He implemented a new logo, but both the logo and Fuoss’ time in charge would be short. During the 1960’s the Post forsook a key element of its personality as it shifted to photographic covers. It wasn’t this loss that killed the Post though, just like LIFE and LOOK a great deal of the credit to the demise of The Saturday Evening Post can be handed to television. The last issue was February 8, 1969.

The Post would return in the 1970’s as a nostalgia magazine. It even had the original logo and would sometimes reprint Rockwell and Leyendecker covers. But the Saturday Evening Post that we are going to concern ourselves with as collectors is that original Curtis Post, 1897-1969, a good long life.

ILLUSTRATOR/ARTIST:

A born Californian from San Francisco, Amos Sewell enjoyed the sun and all the activities warm weather had to offer. In his youth, Sewell was a ranked amateur tennis player (15th in Singles and 9th in Doubles). He was a banker during the day who took art classes for fun. After repeated losses to his champion tennis rival, Donald Budge, he decided to quit the sport. A tennis star throughout the 1920s, Sewell had moved into the world of professional illustration by The Great Depression era of the 1930s.

He began his art education taking eight years worth of night classes at The California School of Fine Arts while working as a banker at Wells Fargo. Sewell worked at the bank from 1916-1930. He always enjoyed art, and often took vacation time to drive up the California coast to paint. It was on one of these trips that Sewell decided to make a career out of his art by moving to New York City.

In 1930, Sewell made the move. To pay his way, he worked a lumber-boat from California to New York down the coast and through the Panama Canal.

Once in New York City, Sewell took more classes at The Art Students League and the Grand Central School of Art. In art school, Amos studied under famed instructors Guy Pene Du Bois and Harvey Dunn. Each of whom became the artist’s entre into the New York City art scene. He also studied privately with Julian Levi at his studio in Easthampton, Long Island after having completed his formal schooling.

In 1932, he married his sweetheart, Ruth Allen. The two never had any children. Though a talented artist, Sewell complained that work was hard to find in the worst years of the Great Depression, specifically 1933 and 1934. He spent his days practicing illustration when there was no work to be done. Soon that period ended, however, and the experience of practice had prepared him to shine as a masterful illustrator.

One of the few financially stable working artists of the early to mid-twentieth century, Sewell kept up his passion for tennis as a hobby. His last documented tournament victory was the 1934 Cup for Westchester County, New York.

Quickly, Sewell began receiving regular work from advertising agencies and magazines around the city. All the incoming work provided a better quality of life. Eventually, he and his wife chose to move from the East Village of Manhattan to the artist’s colony in Westport, Connecticut. During World War II, he won an art award for creating the nation’s best war bond illustrations.

Amos Sewell’s successful career led him to produce covers and illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post, Woman’s Day, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, True, Today’s Woman, Coronet, Liberty, and Country Gentleman. He illustrated for Street & Smith detective “pulp” stories, and a novel, MacKinley Kantor’s “Valedictory.” He was privately contracted to illustrate for large national advertising accounts, but admitted that he had to give those up to focus on his added workload from The Post.

Though Sewell had no children of his own, the artist idealized childhood. He often chose to depict its innocence with empathic images of children playing or unknowingly making mistakes.

Amos and Ruth lived out a quiet life in Westport, Connecticut until Amos’s death in October of 1983 at the age of 82. Today, Sewell is remembered as one of The Saturday Evening Post’s best artist-illustrators.