Do you know why The Popular Magazine had no illustrations?

For a long time, I was puzzled by why the Popular Magazine carried no illustrations. Here’s an explanation from the editor, Charles Agnew MacLean in the July 1904 issue.

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A Chat With You (editorial from the Popular Magazine, July 1904 issue)

DID it ever occur to you what a bully good thing success is? There is nothing like it in this little old world of ours. To succeed means pretty much everything. The happiness is the same no matter what the achievement — there’s only a difference in quantity. A man may win the girl of his choice, or thousands on a stock deal; he may conquer at whist or capture an enemy’s fleet; or he may establish a successful magazine. If he triumphs over the other fellow or does something a little better than his contemporaries he feels pleased with himself, and he has a right to. That is our condition to-day.

WHEN we first conceived plan of publishing the present magazine, we felt that we were a bit like the man who ventures “Where angels fear to tread.” In fact, more than one friend advised us to think it over a while longer. But we were confident of our market. We knew that we should have to fight pretty hard for a place in the public favor, and we also realized that the magazine field had little room to offer a new publication. But there was always the belief that merit will force its way against all obstacles. We had been in a position to watch the public taste in popular literature for many years past, and we have done our share in bringing out successful publications, so we had experience to begin with. And experience, you know, is a powerful assistant in any undertaking.

THEN there were the other magazines to study. There were all sorts and conditions, some good, paying propositions, and others simply fighting for existence. The newsstands groaned under the weight of periodicals, and the news companies had them stacked to the eaves. It did not take us long to decide that we did not want to publish special articles in our new magazine for there were special article budgets literally by the score, nor did we believe that we should issue an illustrated publication. Pictures are good to look at, but so many pictures represent simply waste space —they occupy room that would better be devoted to entertaining text. By the process of elimination, we got down to the plan of publishing stories good stories and lots of them, stories that you can read without feeling a lump in the throat, stories with the blood and sinew of action, stories by authors who know how to transform our prosaic alphabet into the romance and imagery of adventure fiction.

THE next question was the size. We had an idea on this subject, a “great, big stupendous idea” as one of our esteemed contemporaries would put it, but the time was hardly ripe for that. We began in a small way, more for the purposes of comparison than anything else, printing only 96 pages in our first number. The following month we jumped to 128 pages and then we were ready for the big idea— the plan that was to make a distinct record in the American periodical field. When the January 1904, number appeared, the third issue of The Popular Magazine, mark you, it contained 194 pages, the biggest magazine on earth at any price!

WHAT this means is made clear when you understand that the higher-priced publications, such as Harpers, Scribners and the Century seldom exceed 160 pages, and the majority of the ten-cent periodicals, such as the Cosmopolitan, McClure’s, Frank Leslie’s Magazine and Pearson’s, run even less. And furthermore, our 194 pages contained nothing but fiction—no special articles of doubtful interest, and no pictures of even less value. In that same month one of the more important of the ten-cent publications, one carrying 112 pages, had 29 pages of illustrations, leaving barely 83 pages for text! And the largest of the higher-priced magazines carried 41 pages of illustrations out of its 170 pages. This comparison is even more interesting when you know that The Popular Magazine in its third issue contained 126,000 words of engrossing fiction, or enough to make two average-sized novels that sell at $1.50 each. And the price of The Popular Magazine is TEN cents!

MAKING The Popular Magazine the biggest magazine on earth also meant an opportunity to publish stories of greater length than is found in most publications. It meant plenty of serials with generous instalments, it meant complete stories of from fifteen to forty thousand words each, and a whole lot of short stories of a length sufficient to permit of the satisfactory working out of a plot, not mere episodical sketches which seem to represent the policy of the majority of magazines. And it meant more than anything else giving our readers their money’s worth, which indeed is a popular ambition extremely pleasing to the average American.

THERE is such a thing as bigness without value. A magazine of twice 194 pages would not be worth ten cents if the material given was not worth reading. It would be worse than absurd to attempt to sell a magazine solely on its size. In making the POPULAR the biggest magazine on earth we realized that we would have to fill its pages with the very best material or miss our aim. That we have not missed our aim must be very apparent to you. Take the present number, for instance. The list of authors represented includes such well-known names as Francis Lynde, whose book “The Grafters,” bids fair to place him in the front rank of famous American authors; Max Pemberton, E. Phillips Oppenheim and Richard Marsh, a trio of brilliant English authors, whose work is eagerly sought after wherever English is read; Louis Joseph Vance, one of the most promising of the younger American authors, and a dozen others of almost equal note. These men do not write poor fiction, nor do they contribute to mediocre magazines. Their very names on a contents page is a guarantee of good material.

IT is in the nature of things that all this should lead to one result. The success of the POPULAR MAGAZINE was simply a foregone conclusion. But even we, naturally sanguine as we were, did not anticipate such a remarkable degree of success. To find our publication increasing in circulation during the months when magazines sell well as a rule was to be expected, but to see it climbing by tens of thousands during the dull season was unprecedented. And that is what the magazine is doing. We feel that we owe our success to one very obvious condition—your appreciation. Without that we would now be going down in circulation instead of up. It is a difficult task to induce the reading classes of this country to accept a new publication without an extended trial, but magazine readers have accepted The Popular Magazine, and have made it successful before it is a year old.

KNOWING this to be true, we are emboldened to ask you to do a little more for us. In casting about for the best way to let the great reading public know what kind of a magazine we are publishing we have found that no method can equal the spreading of the intelligence by word of mouth. All the stupendous successes in publishing and on the stage were made in that way. Trilby sold many hundred thousands of copies because one reader told another about the book. Probably the most successful play ever staged, East Lynne, gained its vogue because not one woman out of a hundred who saw it, failed to tell a friend of the pleasure she had experienced. Now, we want to ask you to tell your friends of The Popular Magazine. Don’t tell them anything you don’t believe. Don’t tell them that it is one of the best magazines you have read if it is not. But if you really think so, and we are inclined to believe you do, just push it along.

WHEN you come to look at it there isn’t a person anywhere that can afford not to spend ten cents a month for a publication that will give him or her as much entertainment as The Popular Magazine. It is difficult for us to reach all of them, but it is comparatively easy for you to reach your immediate friends, which is your share. If you would tell even three of them to-day just what we have to offer in exchange for ten cents, it would not be long before our circulation would be trebled. And that would be a circulation worth having. We are tremendously in earnest in this matter of widening the circle of our readers, and we are very much in earnest in asking you to help us. It is only logical to believe that by so doing, you will also help yourself. The larger our circulation, the better magazine we can make, and the more entertainment for you.

WE hope you have sent in your replies to the questions asked in the June prize contest. We have received a very great number, in fact, so many that we are encouraged to believe that all of our readers are our friends. If you have not written, just try the July contest and see how much it adds to your interest in the magazine. We have tried to so arrange the questions that we can get not only an opinion of the publication in its present form, but advice that will materially aid us in making The Popular Magazine even more popular. It is surprising how beneficial even a simple little suggestion may prove to be.

WE wish particularly to know about serials. As you will see by referring to the details given on another page, one of the questions reads, “Do you like serial stories?” This is a subject that, just at present, is attracting considerable attention among periodical publishers. Some of the best known will tell you that they do not believe in the serial form of story, and others, equally well known and experienced will tell you that the instalment form of story is liked by their readers, and that it adds to the circulation of their particular magazine. Such publications as McClure’s and Harper’s do not run more than one serial story at a time, while the Ladies’ Home Journal, for instance, published all its fiction in the serial form several months ago. There is much that can be said both for and against the serial, and we are sure our readers will help us to decide the question.

A FRIEND told us the other day that he thought we were setting a pretty fast pace in the present quality of our stories, and that we would find it difficult to maintain the same standard of excellence. That may be true, but we are going to try just the same. There is no greater incentive to the magazine publisher than the fear that the quality of his publication may deteriorate. It is an ever present spur goading him to renewed efforts. We do not believe that we will fail in our endeavor to improve our magazine, and if the plans we have in mind only partially succeed, you will find The Popular Magazine for January 1905, as much superior to the present number as this issue is to the one we published last November, which by the way, was our first.

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The Popular continued with the policy of no illustrations till the untimely death of MacLean in 1928. I don’t agree with the policy but there’s no arguing with twenty plus years of success, and i enjoy the magazine’s fiction in the teens too much to complain about it.

Want to read the complete issue in which this editorial appeared? Head over to the Internet Archive, where you’ll find this excellent scan by Darwination.