Scanning Around With Gene: The Lesser-Known Life Magazine

When I recently ran across some very early editions of Life magazine at a thrift shop, I was surprised – the logo, format, and content were significantly different than the Life magazine that dominated American magazine publishing for decades. A quick check of the masthead revealed that this was not, in fact, an early edition of Henry Luce’s iconic picture magazine, but rather a completely different publication. As it turns out, Luce bought this early version of Life in 1936 just so he could use the name for his new publication (which he launched that same year).
I did a little research and discovered that the first version of Life was also a popular American magazine that published for 53 years between 1883 and 1936. Today’s images are all from editions of Life magazine dated 1919 and 1920. Click on any image for a larger version.


The first Life magazine was launched in a New York City artist’s studio on Broadway by John Ames Mitchell and Andrew Miller. Mitchell was an illustrator and served as publisher – Miller handled the business side of things.


One of the things that set the first Life apart was its early use of zinc-coated printing plates, which improved the reproduction of the publication’s plentiful illustrations and artwork.



Life was as much a humor magazine as anything else and competed with two other popular magazines of the time, Punch and Judge. Early on, Life also specialized in literary works, hiring Harvard graduate and Harvard Lampoon founder Edward Stanford Martin as the magazine’s first literary editor.



I’m afraid I don’t know my history well enough to get all the humor in Life – much of it has to do with labor issues and politics of the time. I’ll have to go back and study 1919 and 1920 to put things in perspective.


Go to page 2 for much more.


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Gene Gable has spent a lifetime in publishing, editing and the graphic arts and is currently a technology consultant and writer. He has spoken at events around the world and has written extensively on graphic design, intellectual-property rights, and publishing production in books and for magazines such as Print, U&lc, ID, Macworld, Graphic Exchange, AGI, and The Seybold Report. Gene's interest in graphic design history and letterpress printing resulted in his popular columns "Heavy Metal Madness" and "Scanning Around with Gene" here on CreativePro.com.
  • Anonymous says:

    Who knew? The early Twenties was about the time photography was poised to supplant illustration in the magazines, wasn’t it? By coincidence, I just started reading Frederick Lewis Allen’s book about the Twenties, _Only Yesterday_, first published in 1931. A great read so far–helped me appreciate the editorial cartoon about Wilson and the League of Nations.

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