A century ago, we were more culturally and artistically advanced. Magazines in the 1920s shined a very bright light on art and culture. One such magazine, albeit short lived, Art Lovers’ Magazine, is but one example of a cultural and artistic publication from 100 years ago when magazines ruled the media world. Here is its story:
Pruriency vs. Stupidity
The editorial continued, “However, the charges were too ridiculous for serious consideration, and the case was thrown out of court. Attempted prosecution of a reputable Brooklyn news-dealer for the sale of ART LOVERS’ MAGAZINE also fell flat.
The magazine opined at the end of its editorial, “There is urgent need for a militant anti-vice society, especially in New York City, but frankly we cannot understand a policy of running around to cover undraped statues, putting the stigma of criminality on reproduction of famous nude paintings, and attacking legitimate art publications.”
The irony here is that Art Lovers’ magazine quoted the same newspaper that let a campaign against the art magazines and theatre because of their usage of nudity in their content as mentioned in Chapter 2. The New York Daily News wrote, and was quoted in the editorial of issue 8, “ There are numerous pecksniffian people who consider that “the nude is rude,” thereby accusing Nature of indecency. In these United States, the land of freedom and prohibition, these ultra-pious persons have formed themselves into Vigilance and Purity leagues, with the result that in several museums and art galleries some of the most famous examples of classical art have of famous statues have had attention drawn to their nudity by being draped in crepe. In one Philadelphia gallery the Purity leaguers have actually immortalized their folly by sewing bathing drawers and a short skirt onto the statue of the far-famed Venus de Milo! Could pruriency and stupidity go farther?”
Reaching out to the NYVSS
Being of moral and ethical background, the Hubbards reach out to the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and “offered to publish an account of the “positive side” of its work, but Secretary Sumner replied, “it would be very inappropriate for anyone representing this Society to furnish matter for publication in your magazine.”
The magazine reminded its readers that, “The Hubbard publications have always stood four-square for clean literature, ever since the Hubbard Publishing Co. was established in 1868, and we are willing to cooperate with the Society for the Suppression of Vice or any similar organization with a constructive program. Our offer of free publicity is still open.”
At the end of the editorial the magazine reminded everyone that, “ART LOVERS’ is the world’s first and original rotogravure art magazine.”
A Soviet Union Link
Having survived the court case, and keeping with its originality, the magazine continued to try to differentiate itself from the rest of the art magazines during the 1920s. It showed great concern with the art, science, and culture of other countries, specifically the Soviet Union and Japan. Keep in mind that the United States of America did not recognize the Soviet Union after the end of World War I. That would take place in 1933, eight years after Art Lovers’ magazine called for more cooperation between the artists and scientist of both countries.
The editors wrote, “The lack of continuous contact between artists, scientists and cultural organizations of the United States and the Union of Soviet Republic has been felt for many years in both countries. Since the war there has been practically no mutual exchange of art or scientific publications – with the result that the institutions and organizations concerned were unable to form any comprehensive idea of the mutual activities and achievements.”
In fact, the editors stopped short of praising a new organization that was established in the Soviet Union by the name of the Joint Information Bureau, “which has been created in Moscow with the aim of assisting in the establishment of closer cultural connections between the Union of Soviet Republics and other countries.”
Russian and Japanese Authors
The efforts of Art Lovers’ magazine did not stop at trying to establish a relationship with the Soviet Union, but it was extended to publish J. Tugendhold, “the greatest art authority in Russia” who wrote in issue 6 “on the folk art of his native land.”
The magazine also announced that in the following issue, issue 7, an article “on Japanese art, from the pen of Shinsei Hiroshige, who needs no introduction to readers familiar with the “Cherry Blossom Land.”
Art Lovers’ magazine once more shows that it is unlike any other magazine on the marketplace.
Singing its own praises
Art Lovers’ Volume 1, Number 5
The editors of the magazine were not shy in promoting the praises and accolades they were receiving from readers, especially with the cover of issue 5 announcing the growth of its print run to 250,000, a 100,000 increase since issue 3.
They write, “CONGRATULATIONS have been reaching our desks by the scores, enthusiastic comments on the continued improvement in the editorial and pictorial departments of this magazine. It is no wonder that the circulation has mounted to a quarter of a million copies monthly.”
Elbert Hubbard II appears on the scene
It must have been a Hubbard family affair with Arts Lovers’ magazine. Elbert Hubbard II was running Roycroft after his father’s death in 1915, and publishing his own magazine, The Roycrofter. He announced himself President of the Roycrofters in the last issue of The Philistine that carried the cover line in red “VALEDICTORY” which of course means farewell.
Under a picture of himself, with the caption, “ELBERT HUBBARD II, President THE ROYCROFTERE, IN.” Under the caption he wrote, ““Bert” Hubbard has served in the Roycroft Shops for twenty years; grew up with the Business. He has worked and won promotion in every Department. He knows this Business, its friends, its markets, its possibilities. For eight years he has been Treasurer of this Corporation and handled the “Practical Business” end.” He concludes, “Now he is Chief of The Roycrofters.”
He made another announcement in that same issue. He informed the subscribers that the magazine will cease publication as of this issue dated July 1915 and starting next month, they will receive its sister publication The FRA. This issue also carried the news that” Elbert and Alice Hubbard Are Dead.”
The older Hubbard, the founder of the Roycrofters has been publishing The Philistine for twenty years and two months. Two years later, in August of 1917, Elbert Hubbard II announced the closer of The FRA the other magazine his dad was publishing and launched his own magazine The Roycrofter from September 1917 until September 1932. The Roycroft Campus declared bankruptcy and closed in 1938 ending an era filled with arts, crafts, and beauty.
The dilemma of publishing a magazine
With all his activities, Elbert Hubbard II, as it seems, was also involved with Art Lovers’ magazine. An editorial signed by him in issue 5 of the magazine, he wrote, in the plural tense as if he is part of the team producing the magazine, on the dilemma of publishing a magazine. His editorial, “GETTING out this magazine is no picnic. If we print jokes, folks say we are silly; if we don’t, they say we are too serious; if we print original matter, they say we lack variety; if we publish things from other papers, we are too lazy to write.
Elbert Hubbard II continues in his one paragraph editorial, “If we stay on the job, we ought to be out getting a new viewpoint. If we go out after stuff, we are not attending to business in our own department. If we don’t print all our contributors send us, we don’t show proper appreciation. If we do print them the magazine is a mass of junk. And, like as not, some wise guy will say we swiped this from an exchange, which we did. – Elbert Hubbard II.”
A family affair: more Hubbards
Art Lovers’ Volume 1, Number 6
Another Hubbard appears on the scene in issue 6 of the magazine: Samuel Hubbard, curator of archeology of the Oakland, CA Museum. The editors were as excited as Mr. Hubbard himself by writing that his discovery, “sent a thrill through the scientific world recently by citing new evidence which, in his opinion, proves the existence of primitive artists in the dinosaur age.”
Samuel Hubbard led The Doheny Scientific Expedition into the Hava Supai Canyon in North Arizona where he made his discovery. He concluded that “some prehistoric man made a pictograph of a dinosaur on the walls of this canyon.” This prehistoric man, Mr. Hubbard smized, “made and used tools and had an eye for form and a sense of proportion.”
Mr. Hubbard concludes, “The interesting thing about this is that no ibex, not even fossil ones, have ever been found in America. These drawings would seem to indicate that they must have been a common animal in the Grand Canyon in the prehistoric past.”
Art Lovers’ devoted almost 2/3 of its editorial page to report on and quote the discoveries of Samuel Hubbard. Another important indication that the magazine was more interested in the culture, science, and art of that period and not just in publishing nude pictures and illustrations for the benefit of art students and artists.
A who’s who of authors
The magazine took pride in the list of authors and artists appearing on its pages. The cover of issue 6 carried the names of Upton Sinclair and Robert W. Chambers in big type. Mr. Sinclair wrote an article on “Who Pays for Art,” and Mr. Chambers wrote about the “Cotton Murals.” In addition, the editor himself published a signed article on the “Laws of Esthetics.”
Upton Sinclair was a famous journalist, author, and political activist. Adjectives that are all in line with the mission of Art Lovers’ magazine. Mr. Sinclair went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1943. (find sources)
As for Robert W. Chambers, another famous artist and fiction writer whose book The King in Yellow published inn 1895 brought him national attention.
In addition to the authors, the table of contents of the magazine included many names with Dr. and Professor titles highlighting the importance and value of the content and differentiating it one more time from the rest of the magazines on the nation’s newsstands. Also, in issue 6 the editors highlighted what more to come in the next issue of Art Lovers’. “THE RAJAH’S VENGEANCE,” a new and thrilling serial story, will be started in the July issue of ART LOVERS’ MAGAZINE. Romance, splendor and fatalism! Don’t miss it. The author is Marie Garcia, one of whose short stories, “Venus of the Dance Floor,” appeared in our May number.”
Another writer is highlighted in this editorial, Dr. Millicent G. Laevey. She is going to write an article, “on how to stay cool in torrid weather, written in the entertaining style for which she is famous.”
Beauty, Art, Fiction and Life
True to its tag line Art Lovers’ in its second quarter was able to combine beauty, art, fiction and life is a package that made the magazine reach a quarter of a million circulation and made the magazine the “largest rotogravure magazine in the world.”
As Art Lovers’ enters its third quarter, progress continues, and more top-notch authors and artists appear on its pages.
To read Chapters 1 and 2 from Nude vs. Lewd please check the previous blogs below or search from them using the search box on the side.
Ron Notarangelo is recreating the love of storytelling and experience making that his mom instilled in him at a very young age. She used to buy and read him books from the 1950s. That love of the books of the 1950s led him, and his wife Marie, to create Trad Hunters magazine that reflects that era but is done in a very suitable and readable 2026 style and form.
The magazine was born from a conversation in their kitchen that took two years to come to fruition. What came out from that idea is marvelous content and an experience for anyone interested in traditional hunting or is curious about it.
I had the chance to correspond with Ron and Marie and was very impressed by their handwritten personal notes they took the time to write in response to my questions. Later I discovered I was not alone in that treatment. They take the time to write personal notes to each and every customer. I guess that is the tradition of Trad Hunters.
While both are identified as creators of the magazine, Ron is the publisher and Marie is the editor. I had the pleasure of talking with Ron for this interview and what follows is the lightly edited transcript of the interview.
But first the soundbites:
On why print: “Being a retro looking magazine, it needed to be print, for one. Also, a lot of the customers who are bow hunters and stuff, they’re older. The demographic is typically like 44 to 65 plus.”
On why they reprinted the first issue: “When we launched, we just did a lot of the writing ourselves and had a couple good friends who would contribute their articles, which helped a lot. So, we added some new content, and we added new art and we just really wanted to make it match what we’re doing now.”
On the personal handwritten notes: “We do a handwritten note for everyone, every single one. So, it takes a bit of time, but before doing the magazine, we had an archery accessory business. And we would do that with our customers too.”
On the magazine’s elevator pitch: “It’s a gritty, no-holds-bar type of traditional hunting magazine that covers traditional bow hunting.”
More on the elevator pitch: “It’s gritty stories that are not censored about hunts from real people, not just celebrities, that take you on adventures across the world. Each volume is dedicated to a specific theme. So, Volume 1 is Alaska. Everything is all about Alaska. Volume 2 is about High Country.”
On the mission of the magazine: “I’m just looking at it like we got something incredible to deliver that’s going to entertain you, teach you with legitimate things that you can use in the real world if you’re choosing to hunt or even survive in the wilderness.”
On the look of the magazine: “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a magazine that looked like it was from that era, (the 1950s), now, but with focus on cool stories like Boy Scout tips, how to do wilderness things, survival stuff, like that, but look like it’s old, I think that would be really cool.”
On the magazine revenues: “But right off the bat, we did a patron thing where people can help support us even more. So, we changed everything right off the bat, the norms, and even advertising, we didn’t even have advertising. We’re not even doing any advertising going forward.”
On their goal: “We’re both thinking about making a better life for us and offer the best possible product and experience for anyone that wants to read Trad Hunters or is curious about it.”
And now for the lightly edited interview with Ron Notarangelo, co-creator and publisher Trad Hunters magazine:
Samir Husni: You’ve launched Trad Hunters one year ago. Did you feel that you needed a traditional platform for a traditional hobby or profession?
Ron Notarangelo: Traditional meaning like in print, right?
I think because of the nature of what we wanted to do with it, being a retro looking magazine, it needed to be print, for one. Also, a lot of the customers who are bow hunters and stuff, they’re older. The demographic is typically like 44 to 65 plus.
So, they prefer reading a physical book rather than something digital. That was only after the fact that we found that out. Our intention was to make it look like a retro style magazine from the beginning.
Samir Husni: In the one year since you started the magazine, what was the reaction so far?
Ron Notarangelo: So far, it’s been incredible. I think one of the challenges that we had was coming up with a price because we didn’t really know how many we needed to print initially.
We guessed and we did a perfect bound magazine, and not saddle stitched, which is a lot more expensive. We chose to do things that really were quality rather than just a traditional magazine. The paper quality we chose is significantly different than regular magazines.
So, that’s even more expensive. But we knew we wanted to make it like that. One of the challenges was figuring out how do we charge, a price that is high enough to cover our costs because we did not know how many to print.
We printed 750 and it costs quite a bit. We also needed to position it where the psychology of people is used to buying magazines, not books. They do buy books, but they will subscribe to magazines over books. So, we needed to use the magazine even though it’s more like a book.
Samir Husni: And you reprinted the first issue.Can you tell me more a little bit about that?
Ron Notarangelo: The very first one that we launched, we had a printer who printed the magazine digitally.
From the second one on we had everything printed on an offset press. So, it was a completely different type of way of printing.
The look is completely different. So, we sold out of the first issue, we printed 750 and then we had another thousand printed of the first one. And then when we sold out, we just started to market number two.
We had a lot of people come back and say, hey, I want to get the first issue, I want to start from the beginning. We didn’t expect to reprint volume one. We were just like let’s just sell it and then we’ll just move on.
We had such an overwhelming amount of people ask that they want to start from the beginning. So, we decided if we’re going to remake it, we might as well because the first one was even a little bit smaller than the ones we print now. It was five and a half by eight and a half inches.
Now, we’ve made it a touch bigger. It’s six inches by nine inches. So, we decided to reprint it so that it’s all consistent six by nine. And we figured let’s just add more stories in it. And when we launched, we just did a lot of the writing ourselves and had a couple good friends who would contribute their articles, which helped a lot. So, we added some new content, and we added new art and we just really wanted to make it match what we’re doing now.
Samir Husni: You take the time to respond to any request to buy the magazine or to order the magazine with a personal handwritten note?
Ron Notarangelo: We do a handwritten note for everyone, every single one. So, it takes a bit of time, but before doing the magazine, we had an archery accessory business. And we would do that with our customers too.
That was something that we brought over to the magazine because we want to show our gratitude and our appreciation for someone taking the time to invest in what we made. And so, we feel it’s a good thing to do to show our respect to the people who buy it.
Samir Husni: Can you give me like the elevator pitch for Trad Hunters?
Ron Notarangelo: The elevator pitch? It’s a gritty, no-holds-bar type of traditional hunting magazine that covers traditional bow hunting.
It can cover different types of traditional hunting. It’s gritty stories that are not censored about hunts from real people, not just celebrities, that take you on adventures across the world. Each volume is dedicated to a specific theme.
So, Volume 1 is Alaska. Everything is all about Alaska. Volume 2 is about High Country. Everything is about high country. And everything is made to look like it’s a vintage 1950s style to complement that. Back in those days, it was all about adventure. It’s not about being censored.
It was really embodied more wholesome times. So, that’s exactly what we deliver with Trad Hunters.
Samir Husni: And during this year, has it been a walk in the rose garden or you had some challenges?
Ron Notarangelo: Oh, we’ve had some challenges.
Because we’re based in Canada. Just a couple weeks before we launched the first magazine, the tariffs kicked in. But thankfully, publications are not a part of that.
It’s a part of the treaty so that publications like schoolbooks or books in general are not affected or are taxed. Thankfully. There are challenges now that the oil and gas situation has caused things to go up. Obviously, people are considering saving money somehow. But I’m not even going to look at that anymore.
I’m looking at it like we got something incredible to deliver that’s going to entertain you, teach you with like legitimate things that you can use in the real world if you’re choosing to hunt or even survive in the wilderness. It’s only $20 and it’s worth every single penny or more for what we’re trying to deliver. I’m not even concerned about it. There’s always challenges, I’m looking past that now.
I’m thinking about the value we’re going to deliver to people every single time that they choose to buy a Trad Hunters magazine. That’s all I’m focused on now.
Samir Husni: What gave you the idea? I know you had an archery accessory business, but what gave you the idea to create a magazine?
Ron Notarangelo: The idea was born in the kitchen with my wife.
When I was growing up, my mother would always go to the garage sales, and she would buy old Boy Scout and story books from the 1950s and read it to the read it to us when we were kids.
So, like, that type of look, and those adventure stories are always a part of something that I personally grew up with. I just had this idea flashing in my head when I was just talking to my wife, because I do a lot of the illustrations myself. I was experimenting with illustrating, a kind of a vintage style.
I just had this idea, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a magazine that looked like it was from that era, now, but with focus on cool stories like Boy Scout tips, how to do wilderness things, survival stuff, like that, but look like it’s old, I think that would be really cool. My wife was, yeah, that would be awesome. So, it was just an idea for almost two years.
I started talking to a friend who was a contributing writer in the first one. And he was like, yeah, this would be awesome, because he’s really involved in the bow hunting community. He said that this would be incredible.
I started kind of loosely developing it. And then when, when the Tard Hunters magazine happened, we had to shut down our other business, that day. We had to do the magazine; it had to work. We had to survive. And I knew it was either now or never, whether it’s possible, we’ll find out right now. So, the decision was made and we’re going to do it. That’s how it happened.
Samir Husni: If you and I are having this conversation in a year from now, what would you tell me that Trad Hunters accomplished in 26, 27?
Ron Notarangelo: We expanded globally; we grew our readers by 10,000.
We didn’t give up, we persisted, we advanced, we broke a lot of molds, it was very common for it to be seasonal, especially with hunting, we did not do seasonal, we did themes. It was very common for a magazine to be the traditional 81/2 by 11, the standard size, we went smaller. We did publish quarterly rather than monthly because the printing cost is very high.
But right off the bat, we did a patron thing where people can help support us even more. So, we changed everything right off the bat, the norms, and even advertising, we didn’t even have advertising. We’re not even doing any advertising going forward. So, in 2027, you’ll see Trad Hunters magazine not have any advertising, we’re going to be everywhere globally. And we’re going to go to the top.
So that’s where we’re going. 2027. And we’ll have we’ll have more volumes by then, too, obviously.
Samir Husni: Tell me before I ask you my typical personal questions, is there any question I failed to ask you about the magazine that you would like me to ask?
Ron Notarangelo: I don’t know. I think we covered a lot of the basic stuff.
Samir Husni: Are you a hunter?
Ron Notarangelo: I don’t get to hunt as much now because this magazine takes a lot of time.
One of the things that if you were to ask me in a year from now, what’s different is that we have more artists doing the work for us. I have hired people to do some of the graphic design because I had to do it up until now. Right now, the volume that I’m working on, I’m the one doing all the creative design. I must do all the InDesign work.
And I didn’t even know how to do InDesign before volume one, I had to remake volume one four times in two weeks to get it to the printer. I started to design it in Canvas. I had no idea even how to make a magazine.
I had to learn InDesign in a week. I’m going to pass this stuff off to someone who’s far better than me. And I’m going to stay focused on the direction where we want to go.
Keeping the look like the 50s in 2026. That’s the standard. It’s going to evolve. Everything does evolve over time. The winning combination is that vintage look, that colored paper, that makes it look vintage. We try our best, we’re not going to add in fake wrinkles and stuff, but we want it to look different. So that’s always going to be the same. It seems to be very desirable.
Samir Husni: If I come one evening unannounced to visit you at home, what would I catch Ron doing? Having a glass of wine, watching TV, reading a book, etc.?
Ron Notarangelo: It depends on the time of day.
I’ve been reading a lot more now. I’ve been taking the time to get back into reading physical books.
I got my copy of The Science of Getting Richright here. It’s just mindset stuff I’m working on right now. If you were to come in the evening, I would be hanging with my kids watching some TV with them or playing with them.
Anytime during the day, prior to what I just said, I would be in my office illustrating or working in InDesign. Plus, I got to do all the marketing stuff now. I’d be on a computer.
Samir Husni: What keeps Ron up at night these days?
Ron Notarangelo: Samir, it’s a tough question. I mean, there’s been a lot happening in the last couple weeks with my family, just a lot of personal family stuff keep me up.
Getting this magazine out, fulfilling orders to customers, making sure that we’re timely making the magazine, there’s so many things that I must do, and my wife has to do because she’s equally doing everything that I’m doing. We’re both thinking about making a better life for us and offer the best possible product and experience for anyone that wants to read Trad Hunters or is curious about it.
Those who know me, they know that my entire career and profession started at age 10 when the first issue of the Arabic Superman was published in my original home country Lebanon in February of 1964. It was the beginning of a love affair with storytelling, heroes and villains, ink on paper, comics and magazines. 63 years later that love affair continues with no let down or a break.
This love affair left a soft spot in my heart for comics until this day. So, when I heard about the launch of Comics! The Magazine I felt that all my dreams have come true, comics, magazines, and ink on paper. Mr. Magazine™ could not ask for any better. I acquired every issue since its launch earlier this year and three of the secret variant covers of issues 1, 2, and 4 at a price that will go unmentioned for fear in getting in trouble with the family.
My affair did not end there, I needed to know the folks behind the magazine and why someone will publish such a great magazine in this digital age? I reached out to Joe Keatinge, the editor-in-chief of the magazine and Atom! Freeman, the publisher and had one of most delightful interviews in my career. It brought back memories of a pleasant childhood and a firm belief in the future of magazines, as in ink on paper.
So, without any further ado, please enjoy those two lightly edited interviews with the editor-in-chief and the publisher of Comics! The Magazine:
But first the soundbites of the interview with Joe Keatinge, editor-in-chief, Comics! The Magazine:
On the need for Comics! The Magazine: “It’s time that there’s a platform for comics that speaks to that level of enthusiasm is the operative word, but also confidence too.”
On the intended audience: “The younger generation is tired of the Internet. I don’t know how close you follow print sales in the comics industry, stores are reporting up to 30 to 40 percent year over year. And that last year was 20 to 30 percent. The people coming in are like 20 years old.”
On the secret variant covers: “There’s a secret cover program and we don’t do it every issue. We like to keep people on their toes.”
On his mission for the magazine: “My mission, personally, with the magazine, again, is what I said earlier: Is to get people enthusiastic about comics. And so with the variant covers, it’s great. They’re selling high.”
On the connectivity between human and paper: “So when you’re a kid and you’re reading Superman, and it’s on paper, and it’s yours, and it’s in your hand, and you’re reading the story, I would assume that there’s a higher level of connection there.”
On the magazine’s goal: “To be of greater service to this industry and become an essential part about how people learn about comics.”
On his future vision for the magazine: “Is that we help inspire people to make great comics. And read great comics, of course. I want people to read it and think, I could do that. Then, they think they can do that and they work really hard and talk about the fight we mentioned earlier. It doesn’t work out. And then it does work out. They keep going and they keep getting better and better and better. And one day, they’re so good, they’re so undeniable, we profile them on the cover.”
On how people decide to buy a comic book: “Atom! (the publisher) did some research a while ago and found that 82% of customers, at comic bookstores, made decisions of what to buy in the store.”
And now the soundbites of the interview with Atom! Freeman, publisher, Comics! The Magazine:
On the magazines mission: “From a business standpoint, it is a platform. From a consumer standpoint, it is just a celebration and a guide for the world of comics.”
On a major challenge: “But print advertising budgets are not something they’ve been doing for a while. Convincing them to make that room or to take away from something else in order to get involved early, that was a challenge early on.”
On another major challenge: “But as a result of that, really our biggest challenge right now is what do we do next? How do we keep the magazine itself exciting? How do we build off of the success of the magazine? Those are the bigger questions that Joe and I spend a lot of time talking about.”
On the high selling price of variant covers: “It takes a lot to really surprise me. I was pleasantly taken aback by the values.”
On the magazine’s digital future: “While we’ve discussed what it would look like to make Comics! The Magazine digital, I think that so far, everything we’ve heard would just be diminishing of the print version.”
On the value of print: “We’re able to have more complex conversations because you’re going to sit and digest it in a way that you don’t, anything that’s on a screen.”
On the future of magazines: “I do think that magazines are going to have a comeback. What we’re seeing in print in comics and magazine right now, I expect to see all over the place.”
More on the value of print: “One of the things that happens in our world is any comic that is on a digital platform ends up on a piracy site. And Comics! The Magazine is on no piracy sites right now.”
And now for the lightly edited interviews with Joe Keatinge, editor-in-chief and Atom! Freeman, publisher, Comics! The Magazine:
Samir Husni: My first question to you is, you said in your last editorial, I love fighters. I love people with vision. Tell me about your fight and your vision with Comics! the Magazine.
Joe Keatinge: Sure. I really appreciate that. I would say the fight or the mission with the magazine is really simple. It’s just to get people genuinely enthusiastic about comics, and that can be genuinely enthusiastic about reading comics.
There’s enough in the world about how everything’s horrible, and that’s just not what we do here.
We are celebrating this art form to the highest degree. Bringing in people that have same sort of mentality, different voices, of course. It’s to spread that genuine enthusiasm for the art form.
Art form that’s fueling not just comics, but television and film and video games. It’s time that there’s a platform for comics that speaks to that level of enthusiasm is the operative word, but also confidence too.
Samir Husni: Why did you decide to do it in print in this digital age?
Joe Keatinge: That’s a great question. It’s something we talked about a lot. It’s because there’s so much digital’s gotten through so much noise. If I live a busy life and I have 10 minutes to determine what comics are out there, you go online and you search comics, there’s a lot of different sources.
A lot of them are skewing negative. So there’s that. The other aspect of it is there’s a new generation coming in and they want physical media.
The younger generation is tired of the Internet. I don’t know how close you follow print sales in the comics industry, stores are reporting up to 30 to 40 percent year over year. And that last year was 20 to 30 percent.
The people coming in are like 20 years old. And it’s two things. One is they’re raised on comics.
They were raised on comics by people like Raina Telgemeier or Jeff Smith or Dave Pelkey. They went in their teen years and they got manga from libraries. Now thanks to there’s a book called Absolute Batman, which is The Book.
It’s the top book in the industry by a huge margin. That’s the new readership. These people who were kids 10 years ago, but now they’re 20 and they have disposable income are interested in this. So they have that education with comics, but also they saw the fruit of the generation that is so digitally focused and living lives online and consuming digital media.
I’m not against the Internet. I mean, that’s how you and I are talking.
There’s a huge great net benefit to it. But you got to be careful in terms of how much you like moderation, essentially.
So I think people really want things like this is 32 pages. It’s now going to be 40 pages. We’re increasing the page count by signature.
You can read it in 10, 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes, maybe a little longer, depending on the issue. You can know everything you need to know to go to the comic bookstore.
Samir Husni: I noticed that with some issues, you have two different covers.You have a regular cover and you have a variant cover, which is selling for up to like 150 dollars on eBay.
Screenshot
Joe Keatinge: We’re experimenting a lot because it’s been a while since there’s been a comics magazine. We’re not the only one. There are other ones.
There’s one called Dummy and there’s one called American Nature. There’s one kind of a comic staple. So, we’re not the only one, but we’re the only one doing it our way.
Part of that is what can we do in print? That’s fun and unexpected. You can’t do in digital.
We were at a comic book trade show, Comics Pro, and coincidentally, it was when we got our first issue comps. We did an early edition of the first issue. An Absolute Batman cover.
I was sitting there and I knew that we did bundles of about 25. And I was thinking you could put anything in these bundles. Because, when the stores receive the bundles, they just have to scan in the initial receiving the UPC of the bundle itself. And then the individual UPCs of the covers so that we can sneak in something really cool. And so I contacted Skybound, the company that created Invincible and The Walking Dead. They do surprise better than anybody else in the industry right now. I knew they would get it. I contacted them and said you got this great book called Terminal coming out. Robert Kirkman, Joe Casey, Art Adams, Dave Finch, Andy Kubert, like all- star team. I was like, what if because we were already planning to do a Battle Beast cover with them, what if we did a secret Terminal cover? We don’t announce it. And it gets in there. And then that sold really well. Then we just did a cover. So, we did a feature in the new issue with Mark Spears, the artist behind a series called Monster Monsters. He is doing a new Spawn book. Spawn, one of the most popular comics in the last 30 years. He actually suggested it. I’ll give Mark full credit.
He suggested what if we do a secret Spawn cover? I thought that would light the world on fire. If Todd McFarlane would approve it, that’d be great. And he did.
There’s a secret cover program and we don’t do it every issue. We like to keep people on their toes.
We also do variant covers with different partners. Sometimes it’s a store. We’ll want to do a variant cover with an artist whom we have relationship with.
With number five, we’re doing covers with Alex Ross. So we have an Alex Ross interview in there. The opportunity came because of that interview. To do a variant cover with him that he will be given out at his booth at San Diego Comic Con. Mad Cave Studios, another publisher. They’re doing a similar thing.
They have a book coming out with John Cusack, the actor. And again, they thought, hey, can we do a variant cover of this? We don’t do pay to play. As the editor, I don’t care what advertisers we have.
It doesn’t affect in terms of content. Obviously, we love our advertisers, and they make the magazine possible. But in terms of content, it’s what’s interesting, period.
If it’s not interesting, they can’t pay enough money to be in there. But it just worked out. Alex Ross is one of the greatest artists of all time.
I’d want to talk to him. And then this opportunity came to do the cover. Great. Same with John Cusack. That’s interesting. He wants to make comics.
Why? If there was a compelling story there, and there was, great. So any opportunity to do something interesting in print.
I think you’ll appreciate this. It feels like there is a re-education going on. Which is funny, because we work in a print industry.
But in terms of having a promotional venture in print, there’s a lot of re-education. And a lot of like, you can do things differently than you were doing them digitally. Actually, I will even go further and say, a level of freedom.
This is going off on a tangent here. We serialized a comic book called Chew. Chew was by Rob Guillory and John Layman.
One of the major hits of the 2010s. And we were talking with them about doing a new comic. And they agreed to do a new Chew, which is a big deal.
And at first, it starts off as, from the get-go, now that I think about it. They have been doing things you really can only do, storytelling-wise. Because it’s a single page every issue, is Chew.
Just one page. The things that they were storytelling are so interesting. Like the first ever edition looked like it was just an ad.
Then in the second issue, well it turns out that ad is part of the story. Why is it? What’s going on there? And then John Layman, the writer, just sent me scripts for issues 9 and 10. And he is doing, again, it only makes sense in print.
The advertisers really get it. We work with a company, one of their advertisers is a company called Oni Press. And they run ads for, it looks like it’s an ad for another product.
Like a liquor ad that takes place in the world of the comic. It only makes sense. It only makes sense in print. If you ran it online, it wouldn’t work as well. They really understood how we can utilize print to tell a different story than we would be able to if it was just like an Instagram ad even.
Samir Husni: What do you think about those variant covers demanding high prices on eBay and are selling much, much more than the regular $2.99 cover price of the magazine?
Joe Keatinge: Well, you have to understand the perspective of the person you’re asking.
Because I’m the editor-in-chief, right? And so, you might get a different answer from our publisher. You might get a different answer from the ad sales guy. My mission, personally, with the magazine, again, is what I said earlier.
Is to get people enthusiastic about comics. And so with the variant covers, it’s great. They’re selling high. It seems like higher every time we do it. But to me, what that metric really… Because that’s data, right? And the data, to me, says people are excited about this. People want… We put the variant covers out in the marketplace and the marketplace dictated the value of it.
And the value of especially that Spawn cover is, again, upwards of $130. We did a giveaway. We gave it away for free at a convention. A number zero issue. That was something we handed out. And now it goes for $80 to $100. You know what I mean?
What I love about your story is you were a kid when you first saw that Superman. It was this relationship between reader and the magazine. There was nothing else in that world. There was nothing else distracting you. But I assume that there’s ads in there, you know. But otherwise, it’s the experience between reader and story. There’s no other noise.
There’s a lot of great digital ventures. I’m not discounting them. Like, obviously, Webtoon. Webcomics in general have been going strong.
A lot of the comics I cited earlier, like Raina Telgemeier’s work and a lot of her contemporaries had webcomics. But there’s just something about the relationship between the reader and print.
It may be biological as well. I read a report a long time ago about the data retention you have reading print versus digital. This is purely hypothetical. I don’t know this for sure. But I wonder, too, when you’re reading a fictional story, if there’s a level of empathy you have when you read print versus digital. So, when you’re a kid and you’re reading Superman, and it’s on paper, and it’s yours, and it’s in your hand, and you’re reading the story, I would assume that there’s a higher level of connection there.
Samir Husni: I noticed in some of the issues you have DC on the cover, and some issues you don’t have DC on the cover. So how do you that?
Screenshot
Joe Keatinge: That’s part of the arrangement we have when we utilize their covers and characters. You know, DC is not the publisher of the magazine.
But it’s just how they protect their copyright of their characters. As simple as that. It’s just like other licenses they do; it’s the same arrangement.
Samir Husni: If you and I are having this discussion a year from now, what would you tell me Joe accomplished in this year, in 26 – 27?
Joe Keatinge: That’s an excellent question. I just want to be of service to this industry, you know, and I think I can speak for myself and my business partners, Atom! Freeman, Rico Renzi, and Gabe Yocum.
We’ve got a good team. And I do feel that we’re all unified. Atom! did some research a while ago and found that 82% of customers, at comic bookstores, made decisions of what to buy in the store. Not influenced by the internet, not influenced by anything else. And that’s why Comics! The Magazine, at this current state, is exclusively through comic bookstores. Because it’s there. and that’s where you’re making your decisions, we want to be there. To me, if you ask the publisher the question, his answer may be different. But for me, it is just to be of greater service to this industry and become an essential part about how people learn about comics. It’s not just reading comics. It’s not just sales to me. That’s an aspect that’s important.
But my real dream with this magazine, beyond 2027, is that somebody reads it and they read about whoever we’re profiling. Che Grayson, Scott Snyder, Mark Spears, or Alex Ross and they read it and he and she are like, you know what? I can make comics. This is just a person. That’s one thing that’s really important to me with the magazine, is the how and the why. Who, what, where, when, why.
All those questions. How and why interests me the most. In part, because I want people to read it and think, I could do that.
Then, they think they can do that and they work really hard and talk about the fight we mentioned earlier. It doesn’t work out. And then it does work out.
They keep going and they keep getting better and better and better. And one day, they’re so good, they’re so undeniable, we profile them on the cover. That’s the dream for me. Is that we help inspire people to make great comics. And read great comics, of course.
Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical questions at the end, is there any question that I failed to ask you I should ask you about Comics! The Magazine?
Joe Keatinge: I mean, honestly, you’re doing great. Your insight is wonderful. So, I’m really grateful for the opportunity.
Samir Husni: Joe, tell me how did you get involved with comics in general?
Joe Keatinge: Oh, boy. Nobody really knows. Comics have just always been around. I am a child of the 80s. And comics were at 7-Eleven. Comics were at Toys R Us. Comics were everywhere. Comics were at newsstands. I think it was probably pack-ins with action figures. There was the Masters of the Universe had comics.
I believe Transformers had comics as well. G.I. Joe, maybe. But Masters of the Universe definitely did.
I had those toys around. So, I would guess that that’s how I was first exposed. However, I will say what made me really love comics were comic bookstores.
I was blessed enough to be surrounded by some of the greatest stores of all time. Like, Santa Monica, California, where I was frequently at. There was a store, unfortunately, no longer there. There was a store called Hi De Ho Comics. If you research the history of Hi De Ho, and I really hope someone writes an extensive history of Hi De Ho, I’d run it in the magazine. You know, it was a comic store where so many people came through.
And they had everything. And it was kind of a mess from what I remember. It wasn’t very, in terms of the organization, Rob Liefeld comics were next to Mobius, which was next to Hugo Pratt, which was next to Manga, which was next to Underground Comics. It was all just there. I remember the first time I ever saw Wizard was there.
I was just like, what is this? Why is Spider-Man wearing a, like a wizard hat? What is this? Everything was so wonderful and strange. Because it was just like Matt Groening, I discovered around the same time, pre-Simpsons, when it was Life and Hell ran in the newspapers. And then they had the Pantheon reprints there.
And it was just this wonderful assortment of work. And that’s really influenced my brain.
It also really influences the magazine. Because I don’t distinguish, people are like are you going to cover Manga at all? Are you going to cover Webtoons? You’re going to cover, it’s all comics. It’s all lines on paper.
A lot of the early issues obviously are influenced by what I’m, what I’m aware of and everything. But, again, talk about what I want in 26 – 27. I want there to be a larger scope to what we cover. I know I have blinders on. And I know there’s so much, I was talking to one of our frequent contributors. Well, he did the thing in number one.
He’s doing another thing in number 10. He’s interviewed in number six. It’s Jim Rugg.
And, you know, great guy. He wrote, he was one of the guys behind Cartoonist Kayfabe, which is really instrumental in building an audience. And he was saying after that Comics Pro conference I mentioned earlier, he realized there are more channels than ever to sell comics in.
Atom! Freeman, the publisher, joins our conversation…
Screenshot
Joe Keatimge: We’re just talking comics here. I was going to say what Jim Rugg was mentioning that there’s more channels than ever. And he also estimates that there are more creators working in comics right now than there ever has been, including the golden age, so to speak. I’m assuming there’s stuff I’m not aware of.
Samir Husni: My typical last questions are, one, if I come to visit you one evening at your house unannounced, what do I catch you doing? Reading a comic? Watching TV? On your computer having a glass of wine?
Joe Keatinge: I live a very private life. I’ll say that. I don’t talk about my personal life openly. But I may be fly fishing. I may not be home.
Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night?
Joe Keatinge: That’s an excellent question. That might be my favorite question you’ve asked. Providing for my family.
And now for the lightly edited interview with Atom! Freeman, publisher of Comic! The Magazine:
Samir Husni: Tell me, from a business point of view, what’s the mission of Comics! The Magazine?
Atom! Freeman:Comics! The Magazine is designed to celebrate the world of comics. It’s designed to give somebody who is new to comics, maybe they just picked up their first Superman comic and they are trying to figure out what this world is.
It’s an entree into a world that Joe and I speak natively. I would say that from a marketing business side, it is a platform upon which marketers and advertisers and promoters can use to launch new properties into the world of comics. The world of comics is very open to new ideas.
It’s a wonderful place to build IP. We’re seeing companies that do multiple TV series, multiple video games. They have tons and tons of properties and projects that are going in other multimedia and making tens of millions of dollars there still launch all of their properties inside a world of comics.
The problem that we saw as marketers was how do we get in front of that audience? Because nothing that was happening on the internet was doing it in this way that magazines used to. There were many of us behind the scenes who were thinking, boy, we really just need a magazine. Eventually, Joe and I ran out of excuses for why not to make one.
We had to do it. I think from a business standpoint, it is a platform. From a consumer standpoint, it is just a celebration and a guide for the world of comics.
Samir Husni: Since issue Zero, has it been a walk in a rose garden or did you have some challenges? How did you overcome them?
Atom! Freeman: Wide open field, Samir. Wide open. We’re just one step in front of the next.
I will say the biggest challenge from a business side was convincing companies that really do need a platform like Comics! The Magazine, that a print advertising budget is something they needed to make room for. They all have advertising budgets. They all have marketing budgets.
But print advertising budgets are not something they’ve been doing for a while. Convincing them to make that room or to take away from something else in order to get involved early, that was a challenge early on. Now I will say that our challenge really is just where do we grow to? We are the best-selling magazine about comics in our space.
There are a few others. They are with different focuses and different mission statements.
But as a result of that, really our biggest challenge right now is what do we do next? How do we keep the magazine itself exciting? How do we build off of the success of the magazine? Those are the bigger questions that Joe and I spend a lot of time talking about.
Samir Husni: Were you surprised when you saw the value of the variant covers selling on eBay for $150 and $80?
Atom! Freeman: Listen, it takes a lot. I’ve been at this now for, I don’t know, 30 years, Samir.
I’ve been in this industry. It takes a lot to really surprise me. I was pleasantly taken aback by the values.
But we know the value of a secret, the value of a surprise. That’s the real challenge. That’s why we come to fiction.
That’s why we come to story, is we want to be surprised. And so we know now occasionally do, like I will say, the Spawn one I really thought was going to, I didn’t know if it was going to do as well as it did. And we have a couple more that are coming up, a couple other surprises that are coming up that I think are going to have a similar effect.
But you never know. Where the market decides those values land, that’s always a surprise, no matter what you do.
Samir Husni: Do you think this can only be done in print?
Atom! Freeman: So far, yeah, so far.
Magazines, books and movies, TV, all of them really did lend themselves to the shift to digital. I don’t know about you, but I don’t even have cable TV or broadcast TV in my home anymore. I only stream.
I do still buy physical books, but I’m just as likely to read them as a Kindle app on my phone, right? Audiobooks are more likely what I consume the most. I will say that of those other platforms, comics really has not made the shift to digital in the way that the others have. And so while we’ve discussed what it would look like to make Comics! The Magazine digital, I think that so far, everything we’ve heard would just be diminishing of the print version.
And I will say that there’s a focus that comes with reading in print that we’re not getting from anything digital. If you’re reading the pages of a magazine, you’re never going to be caught off guard by an alert popping up on the screen, on the page. You’re never going to have anything reminding you of a calendar invite that you agreed to six months ago, which is not exactly what’s going on here, maybe a little.
But it’s never going to happen that way. It’s going to be you are able to sit and focus. And so as a result, there’s this really interesting thing where websites, even social media posts, they could go 10,000 words.
They could go 1,000 words, but they don’t. They go 10, 20, maybe 50 words. We, in a magazine, we have your attention.
So in that having of your attention, we are able to tell more complex stories. We’re able to have more complex conversations because you’re going to sit and digest it in a way that you don’t, anything that’s on a screen.
Everything about the experience. I love the fact that you have Mr. Magazine because I do think that magazines are going to have a comeback. What we’re seeing in print in comics and magazine right now, I expect to see all over the place. People want that community that comes from sitting and consuming something on a monthly schedule, and they want the ability to reclaim their attention.
They want those things, and all of that comes with print, and all of that comes with magazines. I also want to focus. I’m already seeing it in my other interests that I have.
I just picked up two new jujitsu magazines. Field and Stream is back, and it’s a huge, beautiful format.
I think people are ready to unplug and to focus. Unplug and refocus.
It’s a good time to be Mr. Magazine.
I can tell you it’s going to be a good time for that.
Samir Husni: Allow me to ask some personal questions. First, I have to ask, why the exclamation mark after your first name?
Atom! Freeman: That was a social media, or early, it wasn’t even social media. It was an early Internet joke that kind of got out of hand, and it just made it easier to get myself. I’m a marketer by trade, so it just made it easier to get people to talk about me and to quote me and, you know, ask for interviews.
And also, it’s fun listening to British people pronounce it. That’s always fun, too.
Samir Husni: If I come to visit you one evening unannounced, what do I catch you doing? Reading a book, watching TV, fly fishing?
Atom! Freeman: I’m trying to get everyone in comics to fly fish, but we’ll see.
I’m not nearly as private as Joe, but I will tell you that I, in the evenings especially, sometimes I’m gardening. I spend a lot of time, I’m very lucky in that we moved into a property with a big garden. I do spend a lot of time in that, you know, might be a dip in the pool, might be whatever.
But a lot of times it is just sitting and reading. I’ve learned that if I don’t sit and read, my 11-year-old doesn’t sit and read, and I want that for him more than anything else. And, you know, otherwise it’s just cooking, spending time with family.
I will say, the more often than I like, I’m working. Because, you know, trying to build a career inside of comics, it means you do a lot of different, you wear a lot of different hats.
Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night these days?
Atom! Freeman: Keeps me up at night these days. That’s an excellent question. Very little.
I sleep really good. I work real hard, Samir. I wake up early.
I’m already on, I was up at like 4 or 5 a.m. and outbuilding bamboo garden beds and then working for several hours. And then I’ll spend some time with family. So, by the time my head hits the pillow, it takes a lot to keep me awake.
But when it does, it’s usually these businesses that we run, that Joe and I are involved in, they’re here because people have forgotten how. They’re viable because there’s not as much competition for what we do because people have forgotten these skills. And so a lot of times we will come up with an idea or a solution, and it doesn’t feel like it fits right. Or if we just had more experience, we might be able to find somebody who knew how to solve this problem.
Those are the things that will wake me up is, that’s not how we should have done that? It’s that stuff. So, running businesses in this environment that are not AI data centers, it’ll keep you up at night, that’s for sure.
Samir Husni: Well, see the nice thing about AI, I didn’t ask you about AI, but the nice thing about if it’s print, AI cannot steal it.
Atom! Freeman: That’s very true. You know, Samir, one of the things that happens in our world is any comic that is on a digital platform ends up on a piracy site. And Comics! The Magazine is on no piracy sites right now.
A century ago, we were more culturally and artistically advanced. Magazines in the 1920s shined a very bright light on art and culture. One such magazine, albeit short lived, Art Lovers’ Magazine, is but one example of a cultural and artistic publication from 100 years ago when magazines ruled the media world. Here is its story:
“ART LOVERS’ MAGAZINE has a definite mission, as we have indicated in previous issues, and that is to popularize art and culture for readers who have no inclination to delve into technical publications.” Thus opens the editorial of issue 4 of the magazine.
The editors continue to differentiate Art Lovers’ magazine from the tens of titles that are out there on the marketplace, including their own sister magazine American Art Student and Commercial Artist “and other purely art periodicals, but in ART LOVERS’ MAGAZINE we offer the general public a high grade of fiction, a department of Health and Beauty for Milady and a few jokes, in addition to strictly art material.”
Art material that they started to count and include in the table of contents starting with issue 3. More than 60 illustrations issue 4 claims to contain as did issue 3.
Trying to stay one step ahead from the competition and curving a niche for itself separate from the many magazines out there (see chapter 1) the editors present their mission statement one more time stating, “Our purpose is to present cultural material in an attractive and entertaining form; but first, last and all the time we wish to emphasize the importance of captivating appreciation for the best in art, literature and drama.”
In addition to the mission statement, the editors justify the need of Art Lovers’ magazine. They write, “There was a definite demand for a magazine of this character, and the healthy growth of our subscription list and newsstand sales indicates that our influence is being felt. We are always glad to get suggestions and constructive criticism from our readers.”
To Courts We Go
However the magazine was not immune from the long hand of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. John S. Sumner, secretary of the society took Art Lovers’ newsstand distributors to court claiming that it was indecent. An article in The New York Times on May 30, 1925 under the headline “Magazine Sales Attacked In Court; Action Opens on Distribution of “Artists and Models” and “Art Lovers’ Magazine.” Indecent, Sumner says. Publications Defended as Giving Cheap Reproductions of Famous Paintings in Museums.”
The article in The Times went on to report, “Mr. Sumner admitted that the magazines presented reproductions of art from the Metropolitan and other museums and of life from Broadway revues. He asserted, however that exhibition in theatre or museum conferred no certificate of good character or any kind of legal approval on the thing exhibited. He argued that the concentration in cheap magazines of nudes from the stage and the gallery was prima facie evidence of the purpose of the publishers to cater to primitive impulses rather than to highly civilized ones.”
Mr. Sumner “charged that the art business had looked up so suddenly when the new methods were now putting out three different magazines, each entitled “Artists and Models.”
The defense lawyer “asked for time in which to prepare a brief. Magistrate Ryttenberg granted the motion and adjourned all the cases until he had time to consider the brief.”
“The lawyer said that the hanging of a picture in a museum did not give it any legal approval, but gave it a standing as art.”
The June 1925 issue of Hubbard Publications’ Cartoons and Movies magazine had this headline on page 18: “Art Lovers’ Magazine Wins Fight For the Freedom of the Press.”
John S. Sumner was not happy with the decision of the courts, so this time he decided to sue the magazine itself. Again the results were not to the likings of Mr. Sumner. An editorial in issue 8, dated August 1925, of the magazine said, “ART LOVERS’ MAGAZINE has just won another battle in the war for freedom of the press and decency in art, in opposition to unofficial censors who confuse nudity with lewdity.”
The editorial went on stating, “Charges that this publication violated Penal Code No. 1141 (i.e. contained so-called indecent and objectionable matter in text and illustrations) were filed by John S. Sumner, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
“The case went on trial before judges Herbert, Salmon and Herman in Court of Special Sessions, New York City, July 3. Mr. Sumner offered as evidence copies of the May number of ART LOVERS’ MAGAZINE, in which material he regarded as objectionable was carefully marked. The magazine, although officially accepted by the Post Office as mailable, and indorsed by leading artists and other notables, was regarded by the vice society as deleterious.”
Once in a blue moon you receive a magazine that you can’t put down until every page, every picture, every illustration is looked at, time after time, and it gives you the feeling of satisfaction, relief, and an emotional energy to continue enjoying life, the good life.
Like the Wind USA
Last month I received the first issue of the USA edition of the British magazine Like The Wind, and it was exactly what I wrote about in my first paragraph of this blog: beautiful, comforting, soothing, and all encompassing with every page I turned, and I did turn every single page from cover to cover. Mind you, I am not a runner…
I loved the magazine so much that I reached out to its co-founder Simon Freeman in the United Kingdom and requested an interview about this phenomenal magazine that just launched an American edition after launching a Japanese one two years ago, and are ready to launch a French and German editions later this year.
Simon was as passionate about the magazine, ink on paper, running and the human spirit that goes with it, and all things “Like The Wind,” as the magazine itself.
Simon Freeman
So please enjoy my interview with Simon and read all about the launch story of Like The Wind in the UK, Japan, and the USA.
But first the soundbites:
On what is Like The Wind selling: “what we are selling is 20 minutes with a cup of coffee, reading something not on a screen. That’s actually what we’re selling, is just a moment of calm, sitting with a print magazine, just taking a moment to relax and enjoy yourself.”
On the goal of the magazine: “We want to continue to create that sense of calm around the experience of reading the magazine.”
On the uniqueness of the USA edition: “The US edition now uses US spelling. And some of the stories that are in the US edition are unique only to that North American edition.”
On expending into global markets: “It’s about trying to kind of create a magazine that is as high quality and as enjoyable a reading experience as possible for a local audience.”
On his love for the magazine format: “I just love the format of a magazine. I love the fact you read a story. It’s done. You put it down. You don’t have to remember where you are. You pick it up the next time you read another story. I love the long form journalism. I love the way they feel in my hand.”
On the decision to launch the magazine: “Very famously in my world, (my wife Julie) said, we should give it a go. How hard can it be? And that was honestly how it started.”
On choosing the name Like The Wind: “We need a magazine that is evocative, and sort of inspirational. And I just remember we were just sat thinking about it, and Julie said, Like The Wind.”
On why the word run is not in any article title: “We work hard to not include the word run or running in the titles of any of the stories. So when people go to the contents, we don’t have the word run or running in the titles of any of the stories.”
On the usage of social media to advertise: “It’s ironic and interesting. The world that we live in today, outside of social media, it’s hard to imagine how you can reach people with a new title. It’s difficult to know.”
On the status of magazines today: “They’re not the center of culture anymore. They’re very peripheral. And people don’t go looking for them.”
On their unique selling point: “We are selling a product that encourages people to spend half an hour a week or an hour a week off their screens.”
On the difference between ink on paper and digital screens: “The screen is so flat, whatever screen you’re on, whether it’s a laptop or a phone or whatever, it’s just this two-dimensional surface, right? There’s no texture. I love the idea of embossing the cover or foil blocking or like trying to put in rougher paper or smoother paper, because what you’re doing is you’re activating a whole another sense, which is the feel of the thing in your hands.”
On using different types of paper in the magazine: “We put different types of paper in because we can, because it’s something that print allows you to do that digital doesn’t.”
On AI when it comes to content: “I don’t believe that AI has the capacity to be truly creative. So, when it comes to the art, the imagery, the words in the magazine, the editing, the sub editing, I feel that that’s got to be a human, because they bring a creative sensibility that a machine, at least currently, can’t replicate.
I want to read something that’s come from somebody’s heart. I want something that has come from their soul. And I need to know, I need to feel that it’s come from that.”
On going for a run: “It’s amazing, the feeling in your lungs when you finish and the fact that your legs are burning a little bit. It’s all very visceral and analogue. There’s no digital version of that.”
On the importance of diversity in the magazine: “I think there is a continual need and drive to diversify the voices that are telling stories about running.”
On what keeps him up at night these days: “We are pushing our business to the limits and that is causing a lot of financial stress.”
And now for the lightly edited Mr. Magazine™ Interview with Simon Freeman, Publisher and Editor in Chief, Like The Wind magazine:
Practicing what he preaches
Samir Husni: Congratulations first on the launch of the US edition of Like the Wind. I know that you’ve launched an edition in Japan and you’re getting ready to launch one in France and one in Germany, and you’ve been publishing the magazine in England for 12 years or so. Why this global expansion in print in a digital age?
Simon Freeman: Oh, that’s such a good question. It’s a two-part answer. The first part is that three years ago, my wife and I (Julie and I are the co-founders of Like The Wind), were approached by, by a book publisher to work on a book with them.
We said, yeah, absolutely. We love working on it. It was a great book.
It was good fun. What we didn’t understand is that with book publishing, the publisher will then sell the rights to different language versions of the book. We didn’t know that.
So there’s a German edition and a French edition. There’s an Italian edition of this book that we wrote, which is cool. Then, one day the publisher rang us and said, we are selling the rights to a Japanese publisher, but the Japanese publisher has asked whether he can be put in touch with you directly because he wants to talk to you about the magazine.
We were like, sure, sounds cool. So, we got on a call with this guy Mr. Kiyo Fujishiro. He said, I have this business where I translate English language running books into Japanese, which is fine, but I love the idea of a magazine because a magazine is a regular thing you do three, four times a year.
How many copies do you sell in Japan? he asked. We said, none, like 20 copies or something. It was like nothing. He said, could we talk about me buying the license to publish the magazine in Japanese? And in the end, the way things worked out, instead of paying us for the license, why don’t we go into a joint venture? So Kiyo basically takes the English language version, the PDF, and he picks the stories that he wants, he translates them.
Obviously, he’s got, when he started, 46 editions to go back through, none of which had been seen in Japan because we weren’t selling any copies. So, he just picks the stories that he wants, translates them into Japanese, and then he adds probably about 20-25% Japanese stories. That was how Japan started.
What the Japanese edition explained to us was that what we are selling is 20 minutes with a cup of coffee, reading something not on a screen. That’s what we’re selling, is just a moment of calm, sitting with a print magazine, just taking a moment to relax and enjoy yourself. So, the French and German editions that we’re launching this year are based on the same principle, which is, if you’re a native French-speaking person, reading a magazine in English is not as relaxing as reading the stories in French.
We want to continue to create that sense of calm around the experience of reading the magazine. The US edition is slightly different. Basically, it became apparent that printing all of the editions in the UK and then shipping to the US as our US audience was growing fast was, from a sustainability point of view, not great, and from a cost point of view, not great.
We reached a point where we were able to go to a printer in the US and say, well, can we afford to print the copies that we require for the US audience in the US? It will reduce our transport costs, it reduces the amount of time, it’s much better for the environment. So we’ve hit a number that’s allowed us to start working with a US printer. There is an element of the same idea, which is, because we’re doing two different PDFs, they don’t have to be the same.
The US edition now uses US spelling. And some of the stories that are in the US edition are unique only to that North American edition.And I’ll give you an example of why I think that’s important.
There’s a thing in US sport called NIL, Name Image Licensing. Outside of the US, no one knows what that is. It makes no sense at all.
So, if we’re writing a story about NIL, for everyone else in the world, we must explain what NIL is in the story. But the US audience, we don’t need to do that. So, it means that we can now slightly tailor the reading experience to the local audience.
And it’s the same the other way around, right? There might be, a concept that is commonly understood in France. But for the US audience, we need to just explain what it is a little bit because it’s foreign. It’s about trying to kind of create a magazine that is as high quality and as enjoyable a reading experience as possible for a local audience.
That’s why we’re doing it.
Samir Husni: What is the genesis of Like the Wind?
Simon Freeman: When we launched the magazine 12 years ago, I was much more a runner than I am now.
The media options in the UK at the time were very, what I would call, functional. So, the magazines that you could buy were full of training tips and nutrition articles and stuff like that. I already had a coach.
I was trying to break two and a half hours for the marathon. I was running 80, 90 miles a week. So, I felt like I didn’t need the advice in terms of how to run.
But there were this whole bunch of magazines. Rouleur is a good example in cycling. There was another cycling magazine called The Ride Journal, which doesn’t exist anymore.
The Surfer’s Journal. And I was buying these magazines. And so my wife and I were running a route around the Mont Blanc called the TMB over three days.
One of the things we were talking about was Julie was saying to me, I see that you’re buying these surfing magazines and these cycling magazines, but you don’t cycle and you don’t surf. So why are you buying them? And I said, well, I just love the format of a magazine. I love the fact you read a story. It’s done. You put it down. You don’t have to remember where you are. You pick it up the next time you read another story. I love the long form journalism. I love the way they feel in my hand.
I was already at that point spending, goodness knows, 12, 13, 14 hours a day on a screen for work. So, I love the idea that when I wasn’t at work, I could just sit and read something in ink on paper. And Julie said to me, well, why does this magazine not exist in running? And I said, I don’t know.
Julie said, well, we should give it a go. Very famously in my world, she said, we should give it a go. How hard can it be? And that was honestly how it started.
We were doing that run around the Mont Blanc in the September, and we launched issue one the following February. We had no idea what we were doing. I remember Julie going on to Google and saying, how do you design a magazine? We quickly got support.
The team at Rouleur were amazing. They’re based in London. They invited us as soon as they saw what we were doing. They invited us down and said, how can we help? Is there any advice that you need? Other people helped quickly that we emailed them and said, we’re trying to launch this running magazine. How do we do it? So, it’s a nice community of people that are happy to support, especially if you’re making a magazine not in their sector. You know, I’m sure if we’ve been launching a cycling magazine, Rouleur might not have been quite as helpful.
Samir Husni: How did you choose the name Like The Wind?
Simon Freeman: We came up with the name, and again, all credit to Julie, she was the person that came up with the name. The reason we came up with the name was that we didn’t want it to have the word run or running in it. Because all the other magazines were Men’s Running, Women’s Running, Runner’s World, Running Fitness.
We’re like, we need a magazine that is evocative, and sort of inspirational. And I just remember we were just sat thinking about it, and Julie said, Like the Wind. Interestingly, we do sometimes get people who will send us a message and they say, I’ve just discovered Run Like The Wind magazine.
It’s not Run Like The Wind, it’s just Like the Wind. We work hard to not include the word run or running in the titles of any of the stories. So, when people go to the contents, we don’t have the word run or running in the titles of any of the stories.
Samir Husni: How was the reaction for the launch of the USA edition?
Simon Freeman: It’s been amazing. It’s been really, positive. We’re fortunate in that we’ve been selling the magazine in the US almost since issue one, so 12 and a half years ago.
We already had an audience. What’s been interesting is that launching a US specific edition has given us a good reason to talk about the magazine beyond there’s another edition coming out. We can explain why we’re doing it.
It feels as though we reached far beyond our existing audience of subscribers. It’s good. There’s also, which I think is true, an element of collecting.
You mentioned earlier that you had a collection of magazines with first editions. There’s lots of people who’ve discovered Like The Wind at issue 37. And you know that there’s an element in many of their minds that they’re like I want the full collection.
So, launching Like The Wind USA issue one has again given us this opportunity to say, you can start from issue one, you can build this collection with us over the next decade or whatever.
Samir Husni: I’ve noticed you’ve been using social media to advertise the magazine.
Simon Freeman: Yes, it’s ironic and interesting. The world that we live in today, outside of social media, it’s hard to imagine how you can reach people with a new title. It’s difficult to know.
Sometimes I think to myself, well, how did people advertise magazines before social media? I think what’s happened, and I love learning about magazines, I love all sources of information about magazines. I think people would discover magazines on newsstands, right? And that doesn’t really exist anymore, or not in any meaningful sense. So that source of reaching people doesn’t exist.
Magazines, they’re not the center of culture anymore. They’re very peripheral. And people don’t go looking for them.
So, it’s not like people, when I was younger, magazines meant so much to me that I would go and seek them out. I really want a magazine about whatever this topic that I’m interested in. That doesn’t seem to happen so much anymore.
So, unfortunately, well, not unfortunately, the reality is that what people do is they go online and they look for, they search for running stories. We need to make sure that when they look for running stories alongside YouTube videos and books and whatever else, Like The Wind magazine is featured. We are selling a product that encourages people to spend half an hour a week or an hour a week off their screens. And we’re using those screens to advertise the product. What can you do?
Samir Husni: I noticed in the first issue, you use two different types of paper, the matte and the glossy. The reason behind that?
Simon Freeman: Well, again, there’s two reasons, really. One is because the photos fit beautifully on gloss paper. But I think the matte paper has a nice feel. So, it’s like, it’s nice to just have the photos really ping. It gives you that wow, they look sharp on gloss paper. It feels nice to hold a magazine that’s got lots of matte material in it.
Maybe, the other side of it, is because we can, because the screen is so flat, whatever screen you’re on, whether it’s a laptop or a phone or whatever, it’s just this two-dimensional surface, right? There’s no texture. I love the idea of embossing the cover or foil blocking or like trying to put in rougher paper or smoother paper, because what you’re doing is you’re activating a whole another sense, which is the feel of the thing in your hands, which the screen just removes all of that. We put different types of paper in because we can, because it’s something that print allows you to do that digital doesn’t.
Samir Husni: Speaking of digital, do you ever use AI?
Simon Freeman: We do. We are judicious in our use of it. When I’m doing an interview, I’ll sometimes use an AI tool to transcribe the audio file. There are certain things that we’re using it for in the kind of operational side, the backend, like managing subscriptions and things like that.
There are ways that we can use AI to ensure that we are using the data that we need to ship people’s copies in a way that is secure, but faster than us going through a spreadsheet. AI is a phenomenal tool to do something where there are very clear rules and structures to follow. It does it fast.
So, if you say I need you to transcribe this piece of audio, there’s not a lot of art in that. You’re looking for as accurate a representation of that audio file as possible in words. And if you can do it in 60 seconds while you make a cup of tea, and then you come back and it’s ready, rather than spending four hours with it in your ears, trying to transcribe it.
That’s an efficiency. I don’t believe that AI has the capacity to be truly creative. So, when it comes to the art, the imagery, the words in the magazine, the editing, the sub editing, I feel that that’s got to be a human, because they bring a creative sensibility that a machine, at least currently, can’t replicate.
I want to read something that’s come from somebody’s heart. I want something that has come from their soul. And I need to know, I need to feel that it’s come from that.
The other thing, of course, is that what we are publishing stories about is an inherently analogue activity. You can’t AI going for a run. I went out with my brother-in-law this morning for a run along the lakeshore here in Switzerland, with the wind in our hair.
It’s amazing, the feeling in your lungs when you finish and the fact that your legs are burning a little bit. It’s all very visceral and analogue. There’s no digital version of that.
It makes sense then that as far as possible, the storytelling bit should be from humans. If you think about publishing in the broader sense, I think information and maybe news is more under threat because an AI agent can pull information together quickly, more efficiently, potentially, than a human writer. But if you’re publishing what we’re writing, what we’re publishing, which is not informational, it’s inspiration, it’s entertainment, it’s ideas and concepts. That’s got to be a person, in my opinion.
Samir Husni: If it’s not on the web, if it’s print only, AI cannot touch or steal it, or come close to it.
Simon Freeman: I totally agree. It’s part of the joy. There’s a joy and a frustration in things that are not ubiquitous. You can’t have it. I’m sorry. You have to literally buy a physical copy and wait for it to arrive.
It’s amazing, the feeling in your lungs when you finish and the fact that your legs are burning a little bit. It’s all very visceral and analogue. There’s no digital version of that.
We will always publish stories that are written by people, honestly. I think that’s entertainment. People don’t want to go to an art gallery to look at art that’s been created by a robot. People don’t want to go to a rock concert to listen to music that’s been created by these robots.
Art forms, writing, art, fine art, music, you want to know that there’s been a sweaty, fallible human being kind of behind it, because I think that’s why we indulge in it.
Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical last questions, is there any question that I should ask you that I failed not to ask you?
Simon Freeman: I love asking that question. The question I would ask is, if I was asking myself this question is, how do we improve the storytelling that we’re doing in Like The Wind magazine? And to answer my own question, I think there is a continual need and drive to diversify the voices that are telling stories about running.
There’s this myth that running is this easily accessible, you just need a pair of shoes, and you can go for a run, and it’s not true. It’s really not true. I remember when we started, when I started gathering momentum, when we started the magazine, I was the editor originally, and it’s a complete joke because I didn’t know what I was doing, but I would be gathering stories, and you suddenly realize that if you are not an able-bodied, relatively wealthy white man, running is not universally accessible.
What we’re able to do with Like The Wind is to try and tell some of the stories of people for whom running is important, but it’s not ubiquitous. It’s not this easy thing. I remember there was a young man called Ahmed Arbery who was murdered whilst out on a run by some people who decided that he was running in the wrong place, and we had to respond to that, we had to do something about that. I was phoning friends of mine who are black and asking them about this sort of thing, and they were, the universality of their response, which is, it’s not safe for me to go running at night, or in this part of town, or whatever.
I was horrified, I mean, horrified. I was like, what are you talking about? Going out for a run? Surely, it’s just this universal human right. Or I remember talking to women, friends of mine, who would say, it’s annoying when the clocks change.
I remember saying to one of these women why? What’s the problem with the clocks changing? She said, well, I don’t feel safe running on my own after dark. I was like, that’s potentially half the human population. So, I think, the question I like being asked is, how do we make the magazine better? The answer is more diverse voices, more people who can share their experience of running.
I’ll tell you another quick story. We published 40 editions in 10 years, and the 41st edition, the first edition of our second decade, we decided that we would make it a women’s edition. So, we hired a woman called Amory Rowe, and she was the editor for that one edition. It was a fully female team, only female writers, only female illustrators, only female characters within the magazine.
We published this edition, and somebody wrote to us and said, I see that you’ve published this women’s only edition. Should I assume that there’ll be a men’s only edition in the future? And I was like, if we published only women’s stories for the next 500 editions, we would not even come close to rebalancing the lack of coverage that women’s sport gets in the media.
So, in our own tiny little way, I think that giving voice to, to be blunt, giving voice to not me is important. And it’s something that we’ve really focused on. It’s part of the editorial.
Samir Husni: My typical two last questions, if I come to visit you at your flat or your house one evening unannounced, what do I catch Simon doing? Reading a book, watching TV, having a glass of wine? How do you rewind the day?
Simon Freeman: I stopped drinking at the beginning of this year.
The best decision I ever made. I work too late. I’ll often at 9:30 or 10 o’clock, I’ll have to remind myself to switch off. I love reading books.
I’m currently reading Robert Caro’s autobiography of President Lyndon Johnson. That’s probably how I relax towards the end of the day. Political history is exciting.
I love reading about political history or I’ve always got a magazine. There’s always a magazine on the go, whatever different topics. That’s hopefully what you’d catch me doing. We don’t own a TV, so it wouldn’t be watching TV.
Samir Husni: What keeps Simon up at night these days?
Simon Freeman: We are pushing our business to the limits and that is causing a lot of financial stress. And it’s intentional, but it does mean that I will often wake up at two o’clock in the morning and pay for the next print bill or the next salary run or whatever else. It’s hard, making sure that the magazine or the business is financially secure.
A century ago, we were more culturally and artistically advanced. Magazines in the 1920s shined a very bright light on art and culture. One such magazine, albeit short lived, Art Lovers’ Magazine, is but one example of a cultural and artistic publication from 100 years ago when magazines ruled the media world. Here is its story:
Dummy book cover designed using Chat GPT
The Philadelphia Ethical Culture Society
So, what are those societies that the Freeman Hubbard and Walter Hubbard were involved in? According to its website, www.phillyethics.org, The Philadelphia Ethical Culture Society is still active today and it is based on, “Ethical Humanism, a humanist, religious and educational movement, has nurtured religious humanism and contributed to progressive causes for well over a century. Founded in 1885, the Philadelphia Ethical Society is a member of the American Ethical Union.”
The influence of the society is evident in a letter dated August 15, 1925 that Freeman H. Hubbard, in his other role at Hubbard Publications, associate editor of The American Art Student and Commercial Artist, wrote to the National Association for Advancement of Colored People. In the letter he wrote, “When I was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts some years ago, there was one student who was debarred from a traveling scholarship solely (the rest of us believed) on account of his Negro blood. As an artist he ranked very high.”
He continued, “Although I am not a Negro, the incident made me so bitter against race prejudice, and I determined that I would do all I could to break down such prejudice”
Freeman Hubbard goes on offering the association the opportunity to send him any relevant news, stories, and the full details of the literature and art contest conducted by “The Crisis” the association’s magazine. He promised that he “would probably publish the first, second and third best illustrations submitted in the contest, in this magazine, provided you send them.”
The Philadelphia Law and Order Society
The Philadelphia Law and Order Society was founded in 1881 and was a temperance and Sabbath observance organization. It campaigned for the enforcement of the liquor laws in Philadelphia, the proper observance of the Sabbath, and against “white slavery” (prostitution). It claimed in 1917 to have reduced the number of saloons and similar establishments in Philadelphia from 6,000 to 1,910.
The Rev. Walter Hubbard, the son of one of the founders of Hubbard Publishing Company, was an active member of the society according to the editorial in issue 3 of Art Lovers’ magazine. He was also an active preacher and lecturer in the Pennsylvania Anti-Saloon League, according to the same editorial.
The Pennsylvania Anti-Saloon League
And the Pennsylvania Anti-Saloon League was founded in 1895 and in 1920 was a powerful organization advocating for prohibition, and working to ban the production, sale, and transportation of alcohol. This was part of a larger nationwide effort, that started in Oberlin, Ohio on May 24, 1893, and culminated in the passage of the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act. The ban was later repealed by the 21st Amendment in 1933.
So as you see both Hubbard’s were involved in ethical, moral, religious and humanitarian issues even before they worked at Art Lovers’ magazine. However, their background left a great influence on the magazine and its direction.
Beautiful vs. Salacious
The editorial of the third issue of the magazine, dated March 1925, opens with the following: “ART LOVERS’ MAGAZINE is in thorough sympathy with the nation-wide movement to suppress salacious and crime-inciting literature, and particularly to keep it out of the hands of the young.”
“The iron hand of the law cannot deal too strongly with the fly-by-night printers and publishers who pander to the vices of youth.” The editorial continues. It goes on to state, “The Hubbard publications have consistently held this position since 1868, when the Hubbard Publishing Company was founded.”
It adds, “We mention these facts because we take great pride in the traditions of the Hubbard publications. We are proud also of the family ties connecting us with the late Elbert Hubbard (he died in 1915) and his son, Elbert Hubbard II, and we lose no opportunity to speak well of the Roycroft publications of East Aurora, N.Y.”
An article in the same issue by R. G. Ingersoll titled “Art and Morality,” the author writes, “There is an infinite difference between the nude and the naked, between the natural and the undressed. In the presence of the pure, unconscious nude, nothing can be more contemptible that those forms in which are the hints and suggestions of drapery, the pretense of exposure, and the failure to conceal. The undressed is vulgar – the nude is pure.”
A mixed bag of ironies
So taking into consideration the facts about the original Hubbard Publications as a Bible publisher, and the fact that the son of one of the founders is a reverend and a preacher, and the editor is a member of an ethical society, it comes to no surprise to read in issue 3 of the magazine the fact that in “reiterating our support of the “clean books” crusade, we wish to make clear, as Elbert Hubbard once pointed out, that there is a difference between lewdity and nudity, despite the similar pronunciation of those two words. Failure to grasp this distinction has led to misdirected effort on the part of some reformers with whom we are otherwise in hearty accord.”
The irony is, Elbert Hubbard was convicted in 1913 on one count of “circulating “objectionable” or “obscene” matter in violation of the postal laws.” He was later pardoned by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914.
Freeman H. Hubbard refers in his third issue editorial to a new bill introduced by Senator Love of the New York State Legislature. The bill introduced to the legislatures would “class a publication as obscene on the basis of any excerpt from it.” Freeman argued, “In other words, condemn an entire book or magazine by separating a sentence or paragraph from its context, instead of judging the publication as a whole.”
He continued, in the signed editorial, “if the Love measure were passed it would make publishers of the Holy Bible, Shakespeare and many other classics liable to prosecution, in addition to publishers of the best art and medical works.”
However, he was quick to note, “Of course, the purveyors of indecent literature would be the hardest hit, but our point is that no publisher could feel safe from the possible attacks of shyster lawyers, blackmailers, and cranks of all kinds.”
His ethics and morals are quick to appear in his last paragraph of the editorial, “By all means, let’s war on the vice and immorality that masquerades under the name of literature, but we dare not surrender the freedom of the legitimate press to a clique of self-appointed censors and overzealous reformers.”
He concludes, “Literature and art are heritages too precious to be shackled by the forces which should be directed entirely against their enemies.”
To sum his views, nudity is art, lewdity is obscene and there is a big difference between the two as you will see in the coming issues of Art Lovers’ magazine.
The magazine continued its growth journey and achieved a print run of 150,000 print run with issue 3, an increase of 25,000 than issue 2.
And Senator Love’s bill did not come to a vote.
Stay tuned for more of the history of Art Lovers’ magazine 1925-1927.
A century ago, we were more culturally and artistically advanced. Magazines in the 1920s shined a very bright light on art and culture. One such magazine, albeit short lived, Art Lovers’ Magazine, is but one example of a cultural and artistic publication from 100 years ago when magazines ruled the media world. Here is its story:
Chapter 2, Part 2
Art Lovers’ Volume 1, Number 3
The Hubbard Connection
A lot has been written about Elbert Hubbard the founder of the Roycroft handicraft community of the late 19th century and early 20th century. The same can be said about Freeman H. Hubbard who was appointed editor of Art Lovers’ magazine commencing with the second issue of the magazine. However, all the current references about Freeman Hubbard are in his association as an author and editor of Railroad magazine from 1930 until its demise in 1979.
Although Art Lovers’ magazine was published by Art Publications, Inc. in New York City, its covers touted that it is a Hubbard Publication starting with issue 4. The president of the company was Walter W. Hubbard and the associate editor of the magazine was the “Rev. Walter Warren Hubbard, the son of one the founders of Hubbard Publishing Company” that was founded in Philadelphia, PA in 1868 by Alfred H. Hubbard and Frank W. Judd as the Hubbard Brothers and was renamed the Hubbard Publishing Company in 1893 according to the 19th Century Juvenile Series last revision on Feb. 24, 2025.
The original Hubbard Publishing Company was, “a subscription publishing house” and “a well-known Bible publisher,” according to the source.
One early indication of the relationship between Art Lovers’ magazine and Hubbard Publications is the reference to Art Lovers’ in a Feb. 1925 article about the photographer James Wallace Pondelicek in Hubbard’s The American Art Student and Commercial Artist magazine. “Without a doubt, James Wallace Pondelicek, photographer and artist, ranks among the few pictorial photographers of America whose work merits the highest honors. As a figure photographer he is a master,” the editors wrote.
They continued, “Of late Mr. Pondelicek, whose work has appeared in the columns of this, and of Art Lovers’ Magazine, has been going in for advertisement illustration. We hope to persuade him, at some time in the near future, to contribute an article, helpful and technical, based on his experiences along that line.”
With the second issue of the magazine, the Hubbard connection became more obvious. In addition to Walter W. Hubbard and Freeman H Hubbard, the magazine announced the appointment of “the Rev. Walter W. Hubbard, of the Philadelphia Law and Order Society and of the Pennsylvania Anti-Saloon League as associate editor with this issue.”
Between the credentials of Freeman H Hubbard and the Rev. Walter W. Hubbard, you will think Art Lovers’ is more of moral, religious magazine. Read how Freeman was introduced when they announced him as editor of the magazine, “The publishers of ART LOVERS’ MAGAZINE announce the appointment of Freeman H. Hubbard, A.B., as editor, effective with this issue.”
“Mr. Hubbard was a scholarship winner at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts…In addition, he is well known as a writer of short stories…Mr. Hubbard is recognized as an authority on ethics, having recently received the award of the Philadelphia Ethical Culture Society for the best statement of the meaning of the ethical movement.”
The editorial added, “His connection with ART LOVERS’ Magazine, therefore, is assurance that it will be kept to a high moral standard without losing any of its attractiveness.”
As for the Rev. Water W. Hubbard, the associate editor of the magazine is introduced in issue 3 as, “The son of one of the founders of the Hubbard Publishing Company—the Rev. Walter Warren Hubbard, of the Philadelphia Law and Order Society, widely known preacher and lecturer for the Pennsylvania Anti-Saloon League…”
In fact the Reverand Water Warren Hubbard had a story in issue 3 of the magazine titled, “Three Red Sweaters and a Canary Bird.” Another Hubbard also wrote for the magazine; Henry D. Hubbard, the assistant director of Bureau of Standards, Washington, D. C.: He wrote about “Ther Motion Pictures of Tomorrow.”
Yet, one more Hubbard is also included in the third issue of Art Lovers’ magazine. Hesketh Hubbard, “eminent British artist, has assembled a collection of two hundred and thirty-two prints by ninety-seven contemporary British artists, which arrived in this country recently for exhibition, during March, at the Brooklyn Museum, and later in other museums and galleries in this country.”
The publishers of Art Lovers’ magazine were also proud of their relationship with the late “Elbert Hubbard and his son, Elbert Hubbard II, and we lose no opportunity to speak well of the Roycroft publications of East Aurora, N.Y.”
At least 30 new magazines were launched in the first five months of 2026. Those who know me, know that my definition of a magazine is, “If it is not ink on paper, it is NOT a magazine.” Feel free to call those digital platforms anything you want, except a magazine. We never called television radio with pictures.
This leads me to a great editorial written by the editor of the new magazine Rap Central Station. An oversized publication measuring 12X12 inches and refers to itself as a MAGPAPER. The editor writes in the second issue of the magazine, and I quote, “Scrolling ain’t reading. Texting ain’t writing. That line hit even harder after the response to the debut issue of Rap Central Station earlier this year. What we didn’t expect – but we fully respect – is how fast the magazine is becoming a collector’s item. That tells us something important: people still need tangible culture. Something you can hold. Something that doesn’t disappear with a swipe.”
The editor continues, “I’m not gonna front I h’ve been inspired with stories of 2 fledgling magazine publishers from 75 years ago. John Johnson with JET EBONY and Hugh Hefner from Playboy. Both ironically from Chicago. They had visions against insurmountable odds.”
So, what is this magazine that was inspired by two of our great magazine publishers of the last century. The editor writes, “We are an art magazine first. Then artist – driven storytelling. Then music—charted with intention. We believe artists should write their own reviews. Nobody listens harder than the creator. That’s the innovation. That’s how you reverse some of the damage done to hip-hop by speed, neglect, and surface-level coverage. This magazine slows the culture down—so it can breathe again.”
And all what Mr. Magazine™ can say to that is Amen! Let’s slow the culture down a bit, so we can all breathe again.
Nikki Simpson is on a “one woman’s adventure” to help and support independent magazines worldwide. Nikki sees the future of magazines in those independent titles that are being published worldwide on “a daily basis.”
She founded the International Magazine Center specifically for that purpose. She writes about the Center, “My baby is the International Magazine Center – a membership organization supporting independent publishers and freelancers working in magazines. We focus on teams between 1 and 10 people, most of which are owner-run.”
For the first time since establishing the Center, Nikki is bringing her workshops to the United States on June 12 and 13. Titled “Magazine Are Here For Good,” the conference will take place in Portland, Oregon, and will run workshops on circulation, membership and publishing among other subjects.
I reached out to Nikki via Zoom and asked her about the International Magazine Center, and the Magazines Are Here For Good conference. What follows is my interview with Nikki Simpson, founder of the Internation Magazine Center in Edinburgh, Scotland.
But first, the soundbites:
On her goal with the IMC:“What I wanted to do was support independent publishers, teams of between one and ten in a company, because those were the people who were isolated and not just during the pandemic but all the time.”
On the total number of members in IMC: “We’ve got about 190 members and they’re all over the world. 80% of them I suppose are in the UK for obvious reasons but we’re expanding all the time and picking up new members in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and we’ve got a couple in Amsterdam.”
On why a conference in the United States: “I’ve been wanting to run an event in America for a while.”
On why Portland, Oregon: “I thought well if everything’s happening in New York then what’s happening on the other side of town? And so Portland seemed like a good place…”
On the role of digital in magazine publishing: “I always feel digital publishing is the add-on, it’s the way that people can access information if they can’t afford to pay for the (magazine).”
On her hopes for the Magazine Are Here For Good conference: “To meet people who are working in publishing basically.”
On what keeps her up at night: “Falling asleep on the couch usually trying desperately to do the hard sudoku and just getting nowhere. I’m getting pretty good at sleeping…”
And now for the lightly edited interview with Nikki Simpson, founder of the International Magazine Center in Edinburgh, Scottland.
Samir Husni: My first question to you, tell me a little bit about this whole one woman’s adventure creating an International Magazine Center.
Nikki Simpson: Yeah, I love the way you put that one woman’s adventure. I suppose that’s exactly what it is really.
I used to work for a magazine publisher years ago and that’s where I fell in love with magazines. Then I went to work for PPA, which is the National Association for Magazine Publishers in the UK, and I was there for about four and a half years. I had a great time but there were elements of it that I found difficult, and I wanted to run my own thing, but didn’t feel that I could. Then I had a kid. He’s nine now, so I had him and when I came back, I just thought I really want to work for myself because if something’s going to drag me away from my son in this moment, my little baby, then it needs to be something that I really love.
But while I’d been at PPA I had this idea to open a physical building dedicated to magazines and that was what the original idea was. We were kind of trying to think about ways to attract people to come and live and work in Scotland and work in magazines obviously. When I left PPA and I had my child, I came back and thought I want to really spend time on that and see what comes of it. It is not a physical building in any way at all apart from this office that I’m sitting in, but what’s come of it is an international membership for magazine publishers. When I first started that, like the first two years, I couldn’t really quite find my niche because I was still talking to all the PPA members I knew in Scotland and nobody was used to communicating by video so it was difficult to run events internationally and then of course the pandemic hit and that’s when everything changed for me.
I realized that what I wanted to do was support independent publishers, teams of between one and ten in a company, because those were the people who were isolated and not just during the pandemic but all the time. I had people coming to me who had been publishing for five, ten years and say, “do you know any other publishers” and I’m like “oh yeah I know a few.” They thought they were the anomaly, they thought they were the one crazy person in town. So, now we’ve got about 190 members and they’re all over the world. 80% of them I suppose are in the UK for obvious reasons but we’re expanding all the time and picking up new members in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and we’ve got a couple in Amsterdam and it’s just basically where I spend my time is where we tend to be able to pick up members and I love it.
Samir Husni: I see that you are coming to the States and you are doing the first conference or workshop in Portland, Oregon June 12 and 13. Why Portland and why did you decide to start with the States as your first international venture?
Nikki Simpson: That’s a good question. I think specifically Portland because I’ve been having conversations with a friend called Megan, Megan Schertler, I don’t know if you know her, she does a blog called In Real Life Media and she’s a massive print advocate, runs her own consultancy and so on.
Anyway, I’ve been talking to her a lot about events in the US and how most of them were happening in New York. She’d just been involved with a New York event, Mag Culture were running annual events in New York, and I knew of course that being New York there’s going to be hundreds of events going on full stop. The way I approach things in Scotland is I run maybe one event in London a year because everything happens in London in the UK.
So, for me it’s much nicer to run things locally in either Scotland or we run a regular Manchester event as well. I felt the same way about America. I thought well if everything’s happening in New York then what’s happening on the other side of town? And so Portland seemed like a good place, Megan introduced me to somebody who runs a magazine shop there and it looked like there was lots of great independent titles in the area. Then I heard that Broccoli was based in Portland and then one of my members, it turns out, Kitchen Table magazine, they’re in Portland as well. I thought well this is brilliant, all signs lead to Portland.
And then why the US in general? I don’t know, I’ve been wanting to run an event in America for a while. I think, I mean interestingly I’ve been speaking to quite a few people about this and they kind of said why are you coming to America now? This feels like not the best time for it and I kind of feel like well maybe, but if you know if everybody feels that way then maybe I should go against the grain a little bit and go well maybe what people need now is support right and that’s my job is to support independent publishers so why would I, why would I steer clear of that when something bad’s happening you know or something is controversial is happening depending on which way you look at things. I would much rather come and say well, I’m here to help and support you if you want it.
Samir Husni: You say magazines are here for good, I say we are going to have magazines as long as we have human beings.
Nikki Simpson: Yes, I am absolutely 100% on the same page with you on that. One the independent titles specifically are having a bit of a moment now, but I feel like that moment has been building for so long.
When I first started working in magazines, I’ve been working in magazines for about four or five years by that point, and I remember we did this exhibition on magazine publishing, and it was curated by Jeremy Leslie at Mag Culture. It was a fabulous exhibition and it was all these amazing new titles but I mean you could have chosen another 50 different titles, it was just those ones that he happened to choose and so I feel like that was when people really started to go oh okay there’s an alternative to mass media and there’s an alternative to the rhetoric around mass media and print is dying and so on. I just can’t bear that sentence, print is dead, print is dying, I’m like really, really, do you want to meet some of my members?
Samir Husni: My definition of what a magazine is, “if it’s not income paper it’s not a magazine.” We never called television, radio with pictures, we called it television, why can’t we call those digital platforms some name besides magazine?
Nikki Simpson: Another name for it, that’s a good question.
I’ve got a friend who, well one of my members and friend, up until recently she was a digital publisher only and every time she’d come to my conference she’d say to me afterwards Nikki there’s lots of digital publishers out there who are doing great things too and I’m like I’ll think about that. Now she’s just started publishing in print as well and she absolutely loves it and her readers absolutely love it as well. I always feel digital publishing is the add-on, it’s the way that people can access information if they can’t afford to pay for the £30 or $30 in postage. But it’s not the place where people enjoy reading, it’s not the place where people go oh happy days my digital magazine has arrived. It’s just like oh okay well I need to read it, or I should read it or I can read it because I couldn’t afford the print version or whatever but it’s not everybody’s first choice, is it?
Samir Husni: I just picked up the first two issues of a new magazine from the UK, it’s a rap magazine called Rap Central Station, it’s an oversized rap music magazine and in one of their introductions they write, “scrolling ain’t reading. Texting ain’t writing,” which is amazing. So, what are your hopes for this conference in Portland?
Nikki Simpson: To meet people who are working in publishing basically. We’ve got two workshops in the afternoon so I’m running a workshop on how to turn your magazine into a membership and then Joe Berger, a circulation consultant, is running a circulation health check for people. So, people can come along with their magazines and talk about their circulation.
Then we’ve got an evening social event where we’ve got Anja Charbonneau coming from Broccoli magazine and Brett Warnock from Kitchen Table magazine and the whole event is being sponsored by Neesh who are the company that are connecting publishers direct to retailers as opposed to going through a distributor so they’re going to be talking as well and then the following day on Saturday we’ve got a how to launch a magazine workshop for people who aren’t really actually working in magazines at the moment but who want to.
The idea is just to meet new publishers and to help support people. I’ve never been to Portland. In fact, I’ve never been to America so I’m excited to meet new people and to find new ways and approaches of publishing.
Samir Husni: before I ask my typical last questions, is there anything I failed to ask you about the International Magazine Center and about the Magazines Are Here For Good conference?
Nikki Simpson: That’s a big question. As for the Magazines Are Here For Good conference, anybody that’s coming just don’t forget to bring your magazines. For the International Magazine Center, we run a whole series of training courses and events now. I counted it up the other day I’m running 57 events this year albeit three of them are recurring events but 57 events and they’re all tailored for independent publishers. What else can you say? It’s a welcoming community I’m very non-hierarchical a lot of the events that I run are more about peer-to-peer learning.
Our conference is like the people that I invite to come and speak at it are a real range of people so we have people who aren’t even in the market yet, like they’re still students and they’ve maybe you know produced a magazine as a part of their course right through to you know CEOs of major companies, so we try to really cover the spectrum there and I think that’s really important to for people to feel recognized it’s when you have that focus of teams of one and ten people. Huge problems come from that, usually through lack of confidence , so like the majority of my members are teams of one and two people in a team, or you get one person and then they work with three or four freelancers, which means that they’re not sure about whether they’re doing things correctly or where to focus their attention because they’re doing absolutely everything in their business.
You get that kind of moment of inertia when you have too many decisions to make, so it’s difficult for them to move their businesses. That’s something that we help with.
Samir Husni: My two typical last questions are personal questions: If I come to visit Nikki one evening unannounced what do I catch her doing, reading, cooking, taking care of her child?
Nikki Simpson: Now gardening. We’ve got a big garden, and we stuck our garden through Chat GPT and we’re in the middle of building a dry-stone wall and then putting down you know making it split level and all this kind of thing. I do a lot of swimming in my spare time I go to two different swimming classes now a week and I just want to work my way up to be able to do long distance sea swimming. That’s what I’m aiming for or even just a bit of scuba diving that would be nice.
Samir Husni: My final question is what keeps you up at night?
Nikki Simpson: Falling asleep on the couch usually trying desperately to do the hard sudoku and just getting nowhere. I’m getting pretty good at sleeping, what tends to keep me up I often work late so that I can communicate with people over time zones but I think what keeps me awake at night is when I haven’t worked out in my head what the worst case scenario is because once I’ve discovered what the worst case scenario is, I can go okay, and so that will look like what it looks and that’s okay.
But if I haven’t done that yet, I’m going oh my god it needs 300 people to come to my event and how am I going to get them, that kind of a hamster wheel in my head.
Samir Husni: Thank you and good luck on your Magazines Are Here For Good conference June 12 and 13 in Portland, Oregon.
A century ago, we were more culturally and artistically advanced. Magazines in the 1920s shined a very bright light on art and culture. One such magazine, albeit short lived, Art Lovers’ Magazine, is but one example of a cultural and artistic publication from 100 years ago when magazines ruled the media world. Here is its story:
The Audience
In case you are wondering how many artists and art students were there in the 1920s to support and sustain these magazines, the answer is simple: E.B. Hesser wrote in the first issue of ARTS MONTHLY PICTORIAL, “To the laymen, it is surprising how many people need this magazine in their daily word. Without exaggeration, we can point to the following figures: 24,000 photographers, 15,000 commercial artists, including theater lobby artists, 20,000 teachers of art in high and elementary schools, 3,000 advertising experts, 350 editorial and make up men on rotogravure sections of newspapers…”
He added, “All these in addition to thousands of advanced art students, and artists who are “live” enough to keep abreast of the newest compositional ideas. So it is easy to see that this magazine has a decided and distinct field to cover.”
Hesser was quick to add, “It should be regarded primarily as an art trade publication, but it is so edited that nothing therein should be offensive to a clean minded laymen.”
And Hesser was not alone defining his audience. MODERN ART AND STORIES identified itself as “A magazine devoted to the inspiration and technical development of the Graphic Arts. Published for the use of Artists and Art Students, not the general public.”
The same can be said about Paris Art magazine; “With this issue PARIS ART is introduced to art and camera students and all who are interested in the development of modern art.”
One has to wonder if the fact that those magazines are not aimed at the general public, with less than 65,000 possible population according to Hesser’s number, was just a ploy to avoid the troubles with the vice societies, the United States Postal Service, and The New York Daily newspaper that launched a crusade “to eliminate the art magazines from the newstands (sic) resulted in a tremendous increase of the sales of these magazines should prove that the majority of our readers look upon these magazines as a means toward aiding themselves,” wrote the editors of Art & Beauty magazine in that same issue of April 1927.
However, the leading organization that was after the art magazines and other publications they considered immoral was the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice
In the 1920s there was a non-governmental agency by the name of The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The society was founded in 1873 to enforce laws for the “suppression of trade in and circulation of obscene literature, and illustrations, advertisements, and articles of indecent and immoral use, as it is or may be forbidden by the laws of the State of New York or of the United States.”
The society was a direct dissentient of the Young Men’s Christian Association and was spearheaded by Anthony Comstock, who served as the secretary of the society and as well as an agent and inspector for both the Society and the United States Postal Service. (nyhistory.org)
Upon Mr. Comstock death in 1915, John S. Sumner succeeded him in the role of secretary and an agent and inspector for both the Society and the United States Postal Service.
This society was chartered by the New York state legislature, “which granted its agents the powers of search, seizure, and arrest, and awarded the society half of all fines levied in resulting cases.” Encyclopedia of Censorship, New York: Facts on File, 2005. Page 522.
One documented case on how this Society acted in New York City in the 1920s can be found in a one page editorial that Samuel Roth wrote in the March 1927 issue of Beau magazine. Under the heading “MR. SUMNER and BEAU” Samuel Roth, the editor and publisher of the man’s magazine wrote, “Thursday morning, January 27th of this year, I received word from the organization which nurses the sales of TWO WORLDS MONTHLY (Roth’s other magazine) and BEAU nationally that the February issues of these periodicals, which had already been shipped out to all points domestic and foreign, would not be distributed for sale upon the news stands (sic) of New York City.”
“Upon inquiry, I learned that Mr. John Sumner, secretary of that charming body of people known as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, had communicated with the local distributing agency, and had informed it that if certain advance information concerning the impending numbers of TWO WORLDS MONTHIY and BEAU was accurate he would take immediate action against any company that would dare to distribute them in New York City. The local agency had the alternative to refuse to distribute, which it did.”
Mr. Roth, with his lawyer, went to meet with Mr. Sumner. He brought with him copies of the magazines that he found out that Mr. Sumner have not seen or read. Mr. Roth told Mr. Sumner that the two magazines “are written and published for the sophisticated only, that neither by lewd pictures or lewd contents do we make appeal to the baser passions of mankind.”
Mr. Sumner promised Mr. Roth to look at the magazines overnight and would render a decision in the morning. “Came the dawn– and” Mr. Roth wrote, “confident and carefree, I went to see Mr. Sumner who very speedily dissipated my peace of mind. TWO WORLDS MONTHLY was quite alright, he said, and we could go ahead distributing it immediately, but BEAU, ah, that was a different story. It was absolutely unthinkable to let BEAU go out on the harmless news stands dripping with nudes which any little boy may purchase for fifteen cents. No, he did not approve BEAU and if I dared to issue it of my own accord he would unfailingly prosecute me.”
It’s that very fragile line that separates nudity from lewdity that the art magazines had to maneuver their way with the Society and the United States Postal Service. That is the main reason the art magazines of the 1920s continued to emphasize that they are not for general public, but rather for artists and art students.
In the words of E. B. Hesser, the founder of ARTS Monthly Pictorial, he wrote, “The Magazine of Pictures for Artists and Art Students.” He added that the magazine “should be regarded primarily as an art trade publication, but it is so edited that nothing therein should be offensive to a clean minded layman.”
Unlike the rest of the art magazines, a new magazine appeared on the newsstands in January of 1925 with the name Art Lovers’ vowing to be completely different than the rest of the publications, yet it did not escape the wrath of Mr. Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. What follows is its story.
The first issue of Art Lovers’ magazine January 1925
