Liberty was a weekly, general-interest magazine

Magazine

Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...

, originally priced at five cents and subtitled, "A Weekly for Everybody." It was launched in 1924 by McCormick-Patterson, the publisher until 1931, when it was taken over by Bernarr Macfadden

Bernarr Macfadden

Bernarr Macfadden was an influential American proponent of physical culture, a combination of bodybuilding with nutritional and health theories...

 until 1942. At one time it was said to be "the second greatest magazine in America," ranking behind The Saturday Evening Post

The Saturday Evening Post

The Saturday Evening Post is a bimonthly American magazine. It was published weekly under this title from 1897 until 1969, and quarterly and then bimonthly from 1971.-History:...

 in circulation. It ceased publication in 1950.

Editors

The editors included Fulton Oursler

Fulton Oursler

Charles Fulton Oursler was an American journalist, playwright, editor and writer. Writing as Anthony Abbot, he was an notable author of mysteries and detective fiction.-Life:...

 and Darrell Huff

Darrell Huff

Darrell Huff was an American writer, and is best known as the author of How to Lie with Statistics , the best-selling statistics book of the second half of the twentieth century....

. The first editor was John Neville Wheeler

John Neville Wheeler

John Neville "Jack" Wheeler was an American newspaperman, publishing executive, magazine editor, and author. He was born in Yonkers, New York, graduated Columbia University , was a veteran of World War I serving in France as a field artillery lieutenant, began his newspaper career at the New York...

. In 1913, sportswriter Wheeler formed his Wheeler Syndicate to distribute sports features to newspapers. In 1916, after the Wheeler Syndicate was purchased by the McClure Syndicate, Wheeler immediately founded the Bell Syndicate. In 1924, Wheeler became executive editor of Liberty and served in that capacity while continuing to run the Bell Syndicate.

Beginning in 1942, the cartoon editor was Lawrence Lariar

Lawrence Lariar

Lawrence Lariar was an American novelist, cartoonist and cartoon editor, notable for his Best Cartoons of the Year series of cartoon collections...

, who started The Thropp Family, the first comic strip to run as a continuity in a national magazine.

Writers

Liberty carried work by many of the most important and influential writers of the period. Unusual for a magazine of the era, they bought the rights to many of the printed works outright, and these remain in the hands of the Liberty Library Corporation.

The magazine serialized early novels by P. G. Wodehouse

P. G. Wodehouse

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE was an English humorist, whose body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, poems, song lyrics, and numerous pieces of journalism. He enjoyed enormous popular success during a career that lasted more than seventy years and his many writings continue to be...

, and the other contributors included Achmed Abdullah

Achmed Abdullah

Achmed Abdullah , a pseudonym of Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff, was a Russian-born writer. He is most noted for his pulp stories of crime, mystery and adventure. He wrote screenplays for some successful films. He was the author of the progressive Siamese drama Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness,...

, H. Bedford-Jones, Robert Benchley

Robert Benchley

Robert Charles Benchley was an American humorist best known for his work as a newspaper columnist and film actor...

, Walter R. Brooks

Walter R. Brooks

Walter Rollin Brooks was an American writer best remembered for his short stories and children's books, particularly those about Freddy the Pig and other anthropomorphic animal inhabitants of the "Bean farm" in upstate New York.Born in Rome, New York, Brooks attended college at the University of...

, Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, although he produced works in many genres.-Biography:...

, Robert W. Chambers

Robert W. Chambers

Robert William Chambers was an American artist and writer.-Biography:He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to William P. Chambers , a famous lawyer, and Caroline Chambers , a direct descendant of Roger Williams, the founder of Providence, Rhode Island...

, F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...

, James F. Dwyer, Paul Ernst

Paul Ernst

Paul Ernst may refer to:* Karl Friedrich Paul Ernst , commonly known as Paul Ernst, German writer* Paul Ernst , American Pulp Fiction writerSee also*Paul Ernest, philosophy of mathematics...

, Floyd Gibbons

Floyd Gibbons

Floyd Phillips Gibbons was the war correspondent for the Chicago Tribune during World War I. One of radio's first news reporter and commentators he was famous for a fast talking delivery style. Floyd Gibbons lived a life of danger of which he often wrote and spoke.Gibbons started with the Tribune...

, Murray Leinster

Murray Leinster

Murray Leinster was a nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an award-winning American writer of science fiction and alternate history...

, Rob Wagner and Sax Rohmer

Sax Rohmer

Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward , better known as Sax Rohmer, was a prolific English novelist. He is best remembered for his series of novels featuring the master criminal Dr...

.

Reading time

A memorable feature was the "reading time," provided on the first page of each article so readers could know how long it should take to read an article, such as "No More Glitter: A Searching Tale of Hollywood and a Woman's Heart," Reading Time: 18 minutes, 45 seconds." This was calculated by a member of the editorial staff who would carefully time himself while reading an article at his usual pace; then he would take that time and double it.

Columnist and writing instructor Roy Peter Clark

Roy Peter Clark

Roy Peter Clark is an American writer, editor, and teacher of writing who has become a writing coach to an international community of students, journalists, and writers of many sorts. He is also senior scholar and vice president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a journalism think-tank...

 calculated the reading time of an entire issue (February 10, 1940):

I tested Libertys calculation by timing my reading of two short pieces, a fictional story and an analysis of national politics. The first one promised me I could read it in 5 minutes, 25 seconds. (It took me 4 minutes and 40 seconds.) Reading Time for the next was 5 minutes and 35 seconds. (For me, 4 minutes, 50 seconds.) I'm not the fastest reader in the world, but I do have practice and education on my side, which leads me to the conclusion that the magazine got the average reading time about right. Now there is a difference between Clock Time and Experience Time. We say that "Time dragged," or that it "Flew by." Some stories read so well that they trap us in Story Time ("I couldn't put it down"). Others forces us to slog through dense verbiage, an experience where seconds can seem like minutes... In the 58 pages of Liberty magazine, there were 15 features marked by Approximate Reading Time. Rounded off to minutes, here they are in order: 21, 19, 14, 5, 17, 7, 4, 12, 5, 28, 7, 15, 8, 9, 7. I'll do the math: 178 minutes. That's two minutes shy of three hours. That doesn’t count the time it would take to read the ads, the movie reviews, and do the crossword puzzle. Liberty magazine existed in a world without television and the Internet. Time pressures on readers and potential readers change with the times.

Revival as "The Nostalgia Magazine"

Liberty was revived in 1971 as a quarterly nostalgia-oriented magazine published by the Liberty Library Corporation, a company formed by Robert Whiteman and Irving Green. Originally dedicated solely to reprinting material from the original magazine, the 1970s Liberty eventually settled into a "then and now" format, featuring thematically related newly-written articles alongside the vintage material. The new version ended with the autumn 1976 issue. Liberty Library Corporation now offers a similar online feature called "The Watchlist" which features early stories linked to current news headlines. A recent pairing, for example, was a 2009 headline about New York Yankee player salaries and a 1938 article by Joe DiMaggio

Joe DiMaggio

Joseph Paul "Joe" DiMaggio , nicknamed "Joltin' Joe" and "The Yankee Clipper," was an American Major League Baseball center fielder who played his entire 13-year career for the New York Yankees. He is perhaps best known for his 56-game hitting streak , a record that still stands...

 titled "How Much is a Ball Player Worth?"

The complete run of the 1970s version is available online via Google Book Search

Google Book Search

Google Books is a service from Google that searches the full text of books that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database. The service was formerly known as Google Print when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October...

. Liberty Library Corporation, which still owns the rights to the Liberty archives, has stated that Google will also eventually digitize the 1,387 issues that comprised the original magazine's run.

Cultural references

In the Marx Brothers

Marx Brothers

The Marx Brothers were an American family comedy act, originally from New York City, that enjoyed success in Vaudeville, Broadway, and motion pictures from the early 1900s to around 1950...

 comedy The Cocoanuts

The Cocoanuts

The Cocoanuts is the first feature-length Marx Brothers film, produced by Paramount Pictures. The musical comedy stars the four Marx Brothers, Oscar Shaw, Mary Eaton, and Margaret Dumont. Produced by Walter Wanger and the first sound movie to credit more than one director , and was adapted to the...

, Groucho Marx

Groucho Marx

Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx was an American comedian and film star famed as a master of wit. His rapid-fire delivery of innuendo-laden patter earned him many admirers. He made 13 feature films with his siblings the Marx Brothers, of whom he was the third-born...

 exhorts his hotel employees, "Remember, there's nothing like liberty—except Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post

The Saturday Evening Post

The Saturday Evening Post is a bimonthly American magazine. It was published weekly under this title from 1897 until 1969, and quarterly and then bimonthly from 1971.-History:...

!"

In her working notes for The Fountainhead

The Fountainhead

The Fountainhead is a 1943 novel by Ayn Rand. It was Rand's first major literary success and brought her fame and financial success. More than 6.5 million copies of the book have been sold worldwide....

, Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism....

 mentioned the character Peter Keating as "the kind of person who occasionally reads Liberty Magazine", though this reference did not enter the final version of the book. As Rand depicted Keating as a despicable, shallow opportunist and hypocrite, this was no recommendation for the magazine.

In the Alvino Rey song,the female singer teasingly turns down her
male caller with a songful of rejections - "I said no,no,no". The twist ending to the song is what she's actually saying 'no' to is a subscription to LIBERTY MAGAZINE.

External links

• Liberty history
• Retro Galaxy
• Liberty covers
• Liberty WWII cover (April 25, 1942) "Hitler's No.1 Headache" by Robert Low
• "A Magazine, Long Gone, Is Given Digital CPR"; The New York Times
  The New York Times
  The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
  
  , April 16, 2010