American Little Magazines of the 1890s: A Revolution in Print by Kirsten MacLeod (review)

One of the most astute—to say nothing of the most amusing—commentaries on the craze for so-called “little” magazines that swept the American avant-garde literary and art scenes during the 1890s came from the pen of a man who lived through it and then cast a cold eye upon it in a satirical novel. Shirley Everton Johnson’s delightfully wry, yet also informative The Cult of the Purple Rose: A Phase of Harvard Life (1902) deserves to be better known. Thanks to digitization, the text of this rare volume now can be read online or downloaded via Google Books, and it certainly should be. Johnson’s protagonists are a small group of Harvard undergraduates (all male, of course) who, in 1894, fancy themselves aesthetes and dandies, dress accordingly, and affect what they imagine to be Wildean and Beardsleyesque modes of writing and drawing, respectively. In true Decadent fashion, they also treat with irony the very things they profess to worship, including the newly issued British sensation in magazine publishing, the Yellow Book. Finding that the color yellow has already been appropriated by aesthetic circles on the other side of the Atlantic, they establish themselves instead as “The Cult of the Purple Rose,” pledging to sport purple roses in their buttonholes, to hang purple curtains in their rooms at college, and to use only purple ink, especially when they “write purple verses and purple stories and tell purple lies, in lieu of the commonplace white” ones.¹

Even such colorful excesses, however, prove insufficient. Inspired by the example of “two ambitious members of the junior class determined to publish a periodical”—namely, the real-life pair of Harvard undergraduates Herbert S. Stone and Ingalls Kimball who actually did launch their own magazine, the Chap-Book, in 1894, shortly after the debut of the Yellow Book—the fictional cultists decide to do what other artistically inclined Americans, from editors to printers, were doing all around them and so to rival the cutting-edge quarterly from London. As the narrator says, looking back on such ventures from the distance of eight years later, while affecting the voice of one unearthing ancient history,

The ease with which these little pamphlets could be prepared and printed tempted many embryo publishers into the business and they drew about them not a few capable writers. Indeed, some very superior articles appeared in them while they lived. Because the majority of them sought original lines of literary endeavor The Cult of the Purple Rose, as a whole, followed the development of this fad closely. Every day some member would buy a new brochure, and a week’s collection of new issues would be discussed at a meeting of The Cult. It is impossible to recall the names of all these pyrotechnic efforts, and it is quite unnecessary for the purpose of this chronicle.²

Encountering such judgments, which associate the “little magazine” movement with a remote past and dismiss individual examples of it as both forgettable and forgotten, a reader today might be surprised to learn that a few of those “pyrotechnic” periodicals conceived in the mid-1890s were still thriving in 1902, the year in which Johnson’s novel appeared. A new wave, moreover, of small magazines with High Art aspirations (as well as some humorous takeoffs of such magazines), began to emerge after 1900; these were, in fact, flourishing even as Johnson’s novel consigned the whole movement to the purple dust heap of the Nineties.

In the beautifully mounted exhibition that she curated in spring 2013 for the Grolier Club, the bibliophilic institution in New York City, and in the equally attractive catalogue that serves as a permanent record of American Little Magazines of the 1890s: A Revolution in Print, Kirsten MacLeod could have followed Shirley Johnson’s lead. That is, she could have treated...