“MODERN MAGAZINE MAGIC” 1956 CURTIS PUBLISHING CO. MAGAZINE PRODUCTION DOCUMENTARY GG46915

Our story could begin almost anywhere. On a busy corner in a busy day or in a crossroads country store or in a skyscraper in the living room of a suburban home for the magic of modern magazine. In every community at every level, they are an intimate part. Directly and indirectly through articles, fiction, and poetry, they have exerted economic thought. They have helped mold our ideas and ideals, our ethical and social concepts, our prides and prejudices, our likes and dislikes, our fashions, our work and our play. Today more than ever, the printed word is one of the greatest social influences on our way of life. The Ladies' Home Journal is a key to gracious living. It portrays and interprets a world enriched by the interests of women in all walks of life. The Saturday Evening Post is best read and most trusted weekly magazine. One of the products of America's traditional free economic system. It is a magazine for all the family. One of the greatest blessings of our American economic system is the leisure it has given our people and the means and things with which to enjoy this leisure. Holiday is designed and edited for progressive people who realize the great treasure they have in these leisure hours and are determined to get the most out of them. It stands out as a magazine that has from its birth looked ahead. A magazine of creative leisure. Jack and Jill, edited expressly for children, has long been part of the fun of growing up. It helps develop a taste for good reading that will more richly reward them as they grow older. Yes, the roar of the printing press carries its message to everyone everywhere in America. It is the sound of freedom. You hear that sound in the huge new Curtis Publishing Company plant in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania. You hear it in this building on Independence Square in Philadelphia. The Curtis Publishing Company, founded in 1883 by Cyrus H. K. Curtis, today employs more than 7,500 men and women creating and distributing more than 320 million magazines a year. More than 53 billion printed pages, or enough to make a pathway of over two times to the moon and back. Our production story begins in the forests of Pennsylvania, which provide pulp for paper. Trees are a crop that must be re- as it is reaped. As a result of the most scientific forestry and conservation program promoted and observed by Curtis, pulpwood is actually grown faster than it is used. Some trees are marked to be left as seed trees to help replenish the forest. Others are marked for cutting. They are marked because they have reached maturity, and by removing them, the growth of many younger trees will be considerably helped. By a special process called girdling, the marked tree is painted with a chemical that will cause it to die, cause its bark to loosen, and its branches to become brittle even before it is touched by the axe or saw. And when it is felled, much of the bark will fall off, and the brittle branches will collapse easily, causing little if any damage to the younger living trees nearby. The water, which is so vital to paper production, is borrowed from a nearby stream. Recognizing their obligation to preserve nature's resources, the mills make every possible effort, by means of costly equipment, to return the borrowed water to the streams as nearly pure and clean as it is humanly possible to make. The conveyor carries wood to the chippers. 4-ft logs go in, tiny chips come out. The wood heads for the digesters, first step in reducing chips to pulp. Through a series of digesters, filters, and bleachers, the pulp becomes finer and whiter. Another major source of fiber is old magazines. Each year at our mills, more than 23,000 tons of them are transformed by chemical magic into fresh white fiber. The fiber's progress is tracked and checked by the quality control department. These fibers are scientifically mixed with fillers, chemicals, and water before delivery to the paper machine. The pulp is now ready to be made into paper. At the headbox end of this amazing paper making machine, it enters as a mixture that is 99% water. It travels only a rough few feet on a speeding wire screen. Until all those still wet, it is already strong enough to hold together. It races through the many giant heating rolls where it dries thoroughly and is coated on both sides for a quality paper. Then is polished in the twin calendar rollers for a super finish and emerges only a few seconds later as finished rolls of paper every hour. As one roll is completed, another automatically begins roll after roll. Every 24 hours enough paper must be on hand to print more than a million magazines. Hundreds of tons of new paper must be kept in readiness until it is needed to feed the giant presses. Without slackening pace for a fraction of a second, the new roll is joined to the end of the preceding roll and the paper races upward and over the rollers of the big presses. This then is the ultimate destination of the paper that began as pulp wood in the forests of northern Pennsylvania to capture and hold the printed words that will become the Ladies' Home Journal, the Saturday Evening Post, Holiday, and Jack and Jill. But what about the contents of these magazines? Where do the ideas, the words, the illustrations begin? They begin in many places in many ways. In the editorial offices, the editors of each publication, their assistants, and their staffs plan the contents of each new issue many months in advance. The contents of each issue are drawn from many sources. From material or ideas sent in by regular contributors, from unsolicited manuscripts, from staff writers, contributors, artists, and camera. From the laboratories and research departments of the magazines themselves. Here in the Ladies' Home Journal workshop, a trained staff is simply testing and developing new ideas in fashion, food, interior decoration, and in many other fields of special interest to women. All with the goal of making home life more rewarding. Who can resist good food attractively prepared and served? The Ladies' Home Journal has long been famous for its beautiful double-page food spread. A new home is created. First, the various elements of style, color, and arrangement are worked out in drawings and models. The final reproduction in the pages of the Ladies' Home Journal will be a fresh, harmonious, and colorful interior that will inspire homemakers wherever the magazine is read. Holiday, too, is noted for the high quality of its reproductions, its stimulating layout, as well as for its interesting pictorial subject matter captured on film in the four corners of the world. Frequently, the ideas that appear in print come from the readers themselves, young and old, who have important thoughts to express. And who send them in to the editors. And wait in happy anticipation to see them in print. For each issue of Jack and Jill, an additional heartwarming experience is in store. Here, too, is the printed word, but these children may never see it, only feel it with their fingertips. That they too may know the exciting adventures contained within the covers of this magazine, members of the Volunteer Service for the Blind painstakingly transcribe every issue of Jack and Jill into Braille. Without this help, thousands of children would never enjoy many pleasant hours of good reading. Each day, hundreds of manuscripts, from a potentially best-selling novel to the first of an unknown writer, come to Curtis editorial offices on Independence Square. More than 200,000 a year. And every one of these must be read and promptly acknowledged. These magazines must continually search out new talent, new inspiration, and give encouragement. For this is their life's blood. In the course of a year, 60 to 70 new writers are discovered by the editors of Curtis magazines. And there is another story, even more exciting than fiction. The issue-by-issue story written by our advertisers. Basically, advertising is part and parcel of the American way of life and accomplishment. As the key to mass selling, it helped to bring mass production to its present high state of development. And this, in turn, has brought more and better things for more people at lower cost. Advertising has helped give the American people the highest standard of living in the world, with more leisure time than ever before. Through educating consumers' use of new modern products, it has actually helped to create this extra Consumers have to be informed of the goods and new products available. And on their decision to buy or not to buy, rests the fate of American business. To play its part in our dynamic economy, advertising first had to gain reader confidence. On Independence Square, all advertising is checked and questionable ads refused. For Curtis knows that just as successful advertising is a key to progress. The faith of the reader is a key to successful advertising. Vital also to the success of the magazines is the work of the research department which performs important services for both editors and advertisers. What do readers like best in Curtis magazine? What kind of articles, stories, and illustrations do they prefer? The editors must know. The Curtis researchers find out. What do consumers want? How much and how often will they buy? Advertisers must know where their best markets lie and how to reach them. The research department makes detailed studies of entire industries, housing, aviation, the automobile industry, travel, to mention but a few. To help national advertisers create markets and find customers for their product. But the story of what makes up the contents of each issue of a magazine is still not finished. Covers, illustrations, photographs, and cartoons are as essential to these magazines as the words themselves. And they are the special concern of the art editor. Here for instance are some typical covers of past issues of the Saturday Evening Post. Post covers have long reflected a changing America with all the warmth, the whimsy, and humor of its daily experiences. The paintings of nearly every great American illustrator have appeared in the post and other Curtis magazines. This is a picture by one of the greatest of them all, one of the most popular, most loved of contemporary artists, Norman Rockwell. For years, Rockwell has continued to amuse, charm, and inspire millions of Americans. His good friend, George Hughes, also a Post cover artist and one of the country's leading illustrators, frequently visits Rockwell in the latter's Stockbridge, Massachusetts, studio. Millions of people have a good laugh each week at the cartoons of Ted Key, creator of Hazel, probably America's best-known maid of all work. The first step in the reproduction of an illustration is the photographing of the original. By means of color filters, a negative is made of each of the primary colors, yellow, red, and blue, and a fourth for the black. By means of a specially designed screen, photographic images in each of the color negatives are broken into various-sized dots on film or plate. As an example only, this micrograph original illustrates the screen face of the boy. These in turn are printed on sensitized copper. The screen image is protected by an acid-resisting top, and the unprotected areas etched away in a chemical bath. A progressive proof is printed after the four plates have been given the first etch or A careful comparison shows where corrections and color adjustments will improve the fidelity of the reproduction. Meanwhile, the author's words are being readied for type. Perforations in a paper ribbon are being monotyped from the checked and corrected form of the original text. This ribbon is then fed into a machine that miraculously casts each character and assembles them into columns of type called galleys. Line after line, about two letters every second, the completed type is pushed out of the machine, stacked in perfect order, and ejected onto the type platform. Proofs are immediately run off and carefully checked by proofreaders who make any corrections that are necessary. A visual or paste-up of each page is accurately assembled with the exact size and position of each element properly represented. Then, both text and original engravings are assembled into one unit following the paste-up exactly. The completed form is then ready for the foundry. To speed the operation, several plastic molds are made of each form. Each mold is sprayed with a silver coating. And in the electroplating tanks, where it is first coated with nickel and then a thicker coating of copper, the resulting shell then becomes the printing surface of the press plate. In the casting box, a measured amount of molten metal is poured to back up the plate. The curved cast plate is removed and the rough edges are trimmed. It is then given a final shaping so it will exactly fit the curved cylinder of the press. After the finished electrotype is given a coating of chrome to enable the plate to print many impressions without wear, it is ready for the big presses. Meanwhile, technicians are matching ink of every hue and shade to exactly reproduce the colors of the progressive proofs. Curtis presses consume more than 13 million pounds of ink each year. And now it is time to go to press. Each press, over three stories high can print more than 600,000 pages in four or five colors every hour. The jaws of the press swing open for the pressman to position the curved plates on the steel cylinders. As each color is printed, it must be in exact register with the color printed before it, or the printed image will be blurred. To ensure a perfect reproduction, plates must be locked in position to the accuracy of a thousandth of an inch. The ink reservoirs and the ink rollers are ready to spread the ink on the plates. The paper is at a start on its journey through the presses wing speed of over 1,600 ft per minute. The great jaws of the press slowly close, and the press run is about to start. The pressman gives the signal, controls are set, and the giant begins to come to life. Faster and faster whirl the inking rollers and plates until a river of paper is racing by. In less than 11 seconds from the time the white paper started on its journey, it falls clear of the press and perfectly printed on one side with as many as five colors, heated to instantly dry the ink, cooled, turned and printed on the other side with one to five colors, heated to dry, cooled, slit into page width ribbons, folded and cut into 12-page signatures at a speed even the eye finds difficult to follow. The press rolls on to the end of the run and the folded pages begin the next step in their journey to become part of another issue of a Curtis magazine. The folded pages are dropped onto a moving chain, each group in its proper sequence. When they are all in place, they pass through an automatic caliper so sensitive it can detect one page too few or one page too many. One page missing or one page too many and the machine automatically discards the imperfect copy. To make a sturdy magazine, the cover is glued to the inside pages and stitched with wire. It takes more than 26,000 miles of wire a year to bind Curtis publications. The magazines are then trimmed and placed on a conveyor which carries them to the addressed and shipped to their final destination. The Journal and Holiday are bound in a different manner. They move along this conveyor to be side stitched, a binding method designed to give them a durable square back. The pages fall on top of each other forming a complete magazine. After stitching, a roller applies glue to the square back. The cover goes in place on Holiday and on the Journal. The magazines are then trimmed to precise dimensions. The magazines now are ready. The address plates have been typed. The names of more than 8 million subscribers to all Curtis magazines have been printed on the mailing labels. Behind these millions of names and behind the millions of newsstand sales is still another vital chapter in the story of modern magazine magic. The important chapter titled circulation. Like any product, no matter how appealing it may be, magazines must be sold. Salesmanship is the driving force that makes all this distribution possible. With all these aids, the hard work of hundreds of men and women in the circulation department make possible this huge volume of orders for subscriptions and newsstand copies. But now the magazines are addressed and bundled and put into mail sacks on their way to be loaded in freight cars and sent to their destinations. The job of routing enough magazines to completely bury a small city belongs to the traffic department. It has long been a Curtis practice to see that everyone in the United States, whether he bought a magazine through subscriptions or on the newsstand, receives it the same day. Every possible method of transportation is used to assure delivery on time. Behind millions of Posts, Journals, holidays, and Jack and Jill's lies a system which speeds magazines from Philadelphia and Sharon Hill to dozens of major distribution centers. Your subscription copy may travel by freight and by mail. Your newsstand copy was probably handled by one of the local magazine wholesalers. And here our story, which began with the felling of a tree, with the writing of an article, or the painting of an illustration, nears its end. For this has been the story of magazine magic, of the printed word, written to be read today or tomorrow, written to invite reflection, comprehensive, timely, truthful, aware of its