Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/415

Rh with an enlarged experience and a broadened point of view. As a boy, he had learned the printer's trade in his father's newspaper office, thus acquiring knowledge of the aid that typographic art can give to literary form. Like many literary men, he had also studied law—first in an office at Rochester, New York, and then at the University of Michigan. Ever since his boyhood days in the newspaper office and in a New England high school, he had, however, been keenly interested in letters. After locating in Chicago, his tastes again turned to them. His alert eye saw possibilities in the Western Monthly; and, after three or four numbers had been published, he purchased an interest in the magazine and joined the projector of it, Mr. H. V. Reed, in its management. After a time Mr. Reed withdrew from the enterprise, and Mr. Browne became its sole director.

The beginning of Mr. Browne's work in the management of the magazine was marked by immediate improvement in its style and character. The typographical dress of the periodical was changed, and its appearance became at once more dignified and elegant. Biographical features were dropped out, and its appeal became purely literary. The interest in form and subject-matter was not then, or afterward, given auxiliary strength by the use of illustrations. But the typography became so nearly perfect that the Inland Printer has declared it to have been the best in any Chicago periodical excepting only that influential journal of literary criticism, the Dial, which Mr. Browne himself established later.

The change in the name of the periodical was probably the most typical single act of a Chicago publisher during the post-bellum period. The adjective "western" in a magazine title bespoke something provincial, something narrow and restricted in aim and scope. Other publishers evidently felt this. Besides the Western Monthly, only three Chicago literary periodicals started in these years contained the word "West" in their names; and they were journals of a low literary order. A broader and more inclusive title was needed to make the magazine expressive of the spirit of the times. A study of its files and of the history of the period suggested the idea that the editor had doubtless gone