Magazine Publishing: "Living Pages" ~ 1935 McCall's Magazine

more at http://quickfound.net/

'Portrait of the readers of McCall's magazine (housewives) and their lives and desires.'

Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCall's

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

McCall's was a monthly American women's magazine, published by the McCall Corporation, that enjoyed great popularity through much of the 20th century, peaking at a readership of 8.4 million in the early 1960s. It was established as a small-format magazine called The Queen in 1873. In 1897 it was renamed McCall's Magazine—The Queen of Fashion (later shortened to McCall's) and subsequently grew in size to become a large-format glossy. It was one of the "Seven Sisters" group of women's service magazines.

McCall's published fiction by such well-known authors as Alice Adams, Ray Bradbury, Gelett Burgess, Willa Cather, Jack Finney, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Barbara Garson, John Steinbeck, Tim O'Brien, Anne Tyler and Kurt Vonnegut...

From June 1949 until her death in November 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a McCall's column, "If You Ask Me". The former First Lady gave brief answers to questions sent in to the magazine.

Starting in May 1951, and lasting until at least 1995,[2] Betsy McCall paper dolls were printed in most issues. Children could cut out the printed dolls and clothing, or for a small fee (10¢ in 1957, 25¢ in 1967) paper dolls printed on cardboard could be ordered. Betsy McCall became so popular that various sized vinyl dolls were produced by Ideal and American Character Dolls.

Another popular feature which ran for many years was the cartoon panel "It's All in the Family" by Stan and Jan Berenstain. A pair of pioneering female illustrators, Jesse Willcox Smith and Neysa McMein, drew dozens of McCall's cover portraits.

Film critic Pauline Kael worked at McCall's from 1965 to 1966, and was reportedly fired after writing a highly unfavorable review of The Sound of Music.

Sewing patterns and The Queen of Fashion

In 1870, Scottish immigrant James McCall began designing and printing his own line of sewing patterns. As a means of advertising his patterns, McCall founded a four-page fashion journal entitled The Queen: Illustrating McCall's Bazaar Glove-Fitting Patterns.

When McCall died in 1884, his widow became president of McCall Company, and hired Mrs. George Bladsworth as magazine editor. Mrs. Bladsworth held the position until 1891. Though still mainly a vehicle to sell McCall's sewing patterns, The Queen began to publish homemaking and handiwork information, and by 1890 had expanded to 12 pages. In 1891, the magazine's name became The Queen of Fashion, and the cost for a year's subscription was 30 cents.

In 1893, James Henry Ottley took over the McCall Company. He increased the subscription price to 50 cents a year, increased the number of pages to between 16 and 30 per issue, and began to publish articles on children's issues, health, beauty, and foreign travel. In order to reflect the magazine's expanded range of topics, the name was changed to McCall's Magazine—The Queen of Fashion in 1897. In time, the name would be shortened to McCall's.

Despite the name changes, for many years information on McCall's patterns filled an average of 20 percent of the magazine's pages...