Beyond Little and Big: Circulation, Data, and American Magazine History

Finding reliable and objective circulation figures for magazines has been a challenge for periodical scholars for many years. This essay describes the Circulating American Magazines project, which seeks to remedy this problem by making historical magazine circulation data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) publicly accessible. Using case studies ranging across magazine categories like “big” and “little,” this essay demonstrates the scholarly possibilities that detailed ABC data offer and shows how these insights can upend long-standing ideas about American periodical history and radically refine our understanding of U.S. periodical history.