Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/831

 THE LITERARY INTERESTS OF CHICAGO 815

A visit to the World's Columbian Exposition led Claude King, the editor and publisher of Sports Afield, an interesting magazine which he had built up at Denver from a small begin- ning with a sportsmen's newspaper, founded in 1887, to remove his headquarters to Chicago in 1893. As a New York printer who had learned his trade while an apprentice of the Harper firm, Mr. King, ever since moving to the West, had been a faithful reader of the New York Sun. From that paper's pungent para- graphs he had gained the impression that Chicago and its World's Fair were jokes. But Mr. King, who still publishes his maga- zine for a constituency of about 300,000 subscribers, says that seeing Chicago and the "White City" so impressed him that he at once decided to move from a center of influence for a part of the West to the metropolis of the entire section known as the West. Sports Afield, of which half the contents are short stories of outdoor experiences designed to be purely entertain- ing, and half are articles on natural history and scientific sub- jects intended to be instructive, is a magazine well calculated to interest typical western men and boys in the towns and villages and sparsely settled localities. Although of but mediocre literary quality, its written contents, supplemented by illustrations, are of direct appeal to the aesthetic interest. Two-thirds of the mag- azine's revenues are derived from subscriptions, which is unusual. The circulation was built up in the old-fashioned way of personal visits by the editor. In largest part, the magazine goes to the Northwest. Mr. King makes the comment that the people of the Southwest, while having a like interest in its con- tents to that of those in the Northwest, are not "businessfied," are reluctant to subscribe, and when they do give subscription orders forget to remit payments.

Besides the phases of periodical publishing at Chicago in the nineties, shown in this paper, there was also a large increase in the number of papers in the mail-order grade of so-called literary periodicals. As practically all of these "family-story" papers started in the nineties still prosper, this development in that period will be treated in the paper which is to follow on the periodicals of the present decade.