“Magazine,” which comes from the word for “storehouse,” shares an etymology with the French magasin, or “shop”: the concept was to bring different offerings together, and accordingly they became venues where key dramas of the early nation played out. Debate between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans (federal control versus states’ rights) was carried out largely in the volley of The Port Folio and The National Magazine. The dissolution of the Whigs into the Know-Nothings (the Proud Boys of the eighteen-fifties, as Lomazow likes to describe them) happened largely in the nativist turn of The American Review. These dramas are borne out in the Grolier’s one-room display, the paper trail of a nation running, stumbling, and trying to carry its unifying ideas forward.
Many magazines also publish fiction and poetry, of course, and are thus meadows for the nation’s literary progress. Lomazow hunts big game. He has Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, from October, 1851, which contains the first published excerpt of “Moby-Dick.” He owns the issue of New England Magazine from January, 1892, which contains the story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by a writer then going by Charlotte Perkins Stetson (known today as Charlotte Perkins Gilman). Much as Lomazow likes first issues, he seeks out first appearances by now-celebrated writers. The exhibition includes a copy of the January, 1834, Lady’s Book, the first nationally circulated publication to accept a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. The August, 1841, edition of the anti-Whig periodical The United States Magazine and Democratic Review contained the first known fiction publication, “Death in the School-Room,” by a young writer then calling himself Walter Whitman. Occasionally, Lomazow chases down amateur output. A display case at the Grolier contains Tabula, a high-school lit mag, from Oak Park, Illinois, in 1916, that contains Ernest Hemingway’s earliest appearance in print. So, any good? “It’s O.K.,” Lomazow said.
What’s exciting about the Grolier exhibition isn’t how much it makes visible (most of the magazines are included face-up, as covers, not as browsable objects) but the way it packs three hundred years of shared American past into one room. The cases in the exhibition gallery sit in a horseshoe. You start on the left and watch the decades, then the centuries, flap by. The main line of the show proceeds chronologically, but six cases don’t. One is about baseball. Another is about radio and screen magazines, from the early fan publications to TV Guide. There are displays about art in magazines and about pulp magazines. (“The pulps are unreadable,” Lomazow said—yet they helped construct pop culture, science fiction, fantasy, and comics, the dream life of the American public.) And, just in time for Black History Month, there are two cases centered on the American Black experience, which trace how periodicals helped shape identity and an ongoing national dialogue about race.