Frank Andrew Munsey

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Frank Andrew Munsey 1919

Frank Andrew Munsey (born August 21, 1854 in Mercer , Maine ; died December 22, 1925 in New York City ) was an American magazine and newspaper publisher and writer. He was an early advocate of a publishing policy aimed at the establishment of newspaper monopolies and is considered to be the inventor of Pulp magazine with Argosy magazine .

Life

Beginnings

Munsey was the son of Andrew Chauncey Munsey, a farmer and carpenter, and Mary Jane Merritt, née Hopkins. He attended Eastman Business College in Poughkeepsie , New York for a few months in 1881 , but apart from that he had no formal education and was a self-taught and self-made man from the start. He started working in a grocery store in Lisbon Falls, Maine as a teenager and during that time he learned the basics of telegraphy . He resigned and worked from then on as a telegraph operator in a number of New England hotels to eventually become head of the Western Union office in Augusta .

Augusta was the home of Republican senator and presidential candidate James G. Blaine at the time . Munsey lived in Augusta House , a meeting place for politicians and journalists, and his impressions of politics and of the not very sophisticated, but quite profitable newspaper industry in Augusta aroused a lifelong passion for politics and the press. Munsey decided to go to New York and publish his own magazine, a youth magazine called Golden Argosy . As start-up capital he had $ 500 in his own savings and $ 3500 equity capital from two business partners, with which he now began to buy suitable manuscripts, including Do or Dare; or, A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune by Horatio Alger .

Argosy

Title page Golden Argosy (1887)

When Munsey arrived in New York in September 1882, he had only $ 40 of his capital left, and at the same time he had a basic stock of manuscripts. When one of his business partners left, he also released the other from his obligations. He was now completely free in his approach, but also very short of capital. He made an agreement with a printer according to which he would work for him and the printer would also publish his magazine. On December 2, 1882, Golden Argosy appeared for the first time and from then on weekly. When the print shop went bankrupt five months later, Munsey became the magazine's publisher. With the help of a loan of $ 300 from a banker in Augusta, he was able to publish more books, but had to become his own author because he had insufficient funds to purchase manuscripts. He subsequently wrote a number of novels for young people, which were printed in sequels in Golden Argosy . The first of these novels was Under Fire , published in 1885. As a result, Munsey's novels also appeared in book editions.

Munsey experimented with content and form in the following years to increase the circulation of his magazine and also changed the title, which was shortened to The Argosy . After all, sales rose to $ 1,500 a week in 1887, which provided a basis for starting further publications. Munsey's Illustrated Weekly , a weekly political magazine published in support of Blaine's presidential candidacy in 1884, turned out to be a costly adventure. Munsey's Weekly , which was renamed Munsey's Magazine in 1891 and switched to monthly publication, was just as unsuccessful . Finally, in 1893, there was the changeover to the cheaper newspaper printing process and the reduction in price from 25 to 10 cents. With that the Pulp-Magazin was born, later known as Dime Novel or in German as a booklet novel . But initially it stayed with the magazine format. This was the turning point for great success. In 1898 it had the world's highest circulation of magazines. In order to counter a boycott of the distribution of his magazine by the competition indignant about its cheap production, he founded his own distribution company Red Star News , but Munsey did not leave it at that, but also founded his own printing company in New London , Connecticut , and in 1895 Follow a hotel chain and grocery chain, the Mohican Stores .

In addition to Argosy and Munsey's Magazine , other specialized magazines have now appeared: Peterson's Magazine , Scrap Book (1895), Quaker and Puritan (1897), Junior Munsey (1900), Godey's Ladies Book (1898), The All-Story (1905), Woman and The Scrap Book (1906), Ocean (1907), Live Wire (1908), Railroad Man's Magazine (1906), The Cavalier (1908) and Railroad (1919). The total print run in 1901, Munsey claimed, exceeded that of its main competitors Harper’s , Scribner’s and Century combined. In 1907 he could say of himself that he had made $ 9 million in the publishing business in 25 years.

Newspaper empire

Munsey was certainly not the first to become a publisher for the sake of money, but he was one of the first to openly admit to running his business for the sole purpose of commercial success and being completely sober and unsentimental.

This sobriety was offensive when it came to traditional newspapers that Munsey began buying and selling in the early 1900s, and often hired to get rid of competition. In 1901 he began taking over the New York Daily News and the Washington Times . In 1902 he bought The Boston Journal , discontinued its evening edition in 1903 and replaced it with Evening News , which he discontinued the following year. In the following years he acquired the Philadelphia Times and Baltimore News (1908), New York Press (1912), New York Sun (1916), New York Herald , New York Evening Telegram , Baltimore American , Baltimore News , Baltimore Star (1920), New York Globe (1923) and New York Evening Mail (1924) - and what he bought he either resold or discontinued, so that by the end of his life he owned only two newspapers, the New York Evening Telegram and New York Evening Sun . His dream of a press empire in the style of the big trusts had thus failed for him, but would later become a reality for others - including William Randolph Hearst , buyer of some of Munsey's newspapers.

The fact that Munsey stopped or had to stop numerous publications earned him criticism from the affected readership and the hatred of journalists. He was called the "gravedigger of journalism" and his reputation has been damaged in the long run. In an obituary, William Allen White blamed him for “turning a once noble profession into an 8 percent investment”.

The End

Munsey's political ambitions were also disappointed. As a trusted Republican supporter, when Warren G. Harding became president in 1920, he had hoped to become ambassador to the court of St. James , but that hope was completely ignored and Munsey withdrew from politics altogether.

At the end of his life he was dissatisfied with what he had achieved:

"I have no heirs. I am disappointed in my friendships. And I have no clear views on religious problems. Today I have forty million dollars, but what has it brought me? Not happiness. "

“I have no heirs. I am disappointed in my friends. I haven't found any clarity on religious questions either. Today I have $ 40 million, but what good does that do me? No luck."

The story of the boy from a small family who rose to become a newspaper magnate ended with a poor rich man who died in New York in 1925 with a few friends and employees.

Cover illustration of All-Story with a futuristic aircraft (1908)

In retrospect, Munsey is particularly important as the inventor of the pulp magazine format and indirectly as a pioneer of science fiction , as numerous important authors from the early days of SF and fantasy published their stories in Munsey's magazines, including Edgar Rice Burroughs , Ray Cummings , George Allan England , Ralph Milne Farley , Homer Eon Flint , Austin Hall , Otis Adelbert Kline , Abraham Merritt and Sax Rohmer . Although there was not a single one of Munsey's numerous magazine titles devoted exclusively to fantasy, there were still a few in which fantastic stories had at least a significant share. These include next to The Argosy and Munsey's Magazine and The Scrap Book , The All-Story and The Cavalier , and these too were not spared Munseys changes, name changes and mergers and so titles such as All-Story Weekly and Argosy All-Story Weekly emerged .

bibliography

Novels
Essays
  • Getting On in Journalism: Address of Frank A. Munsey at the annual meeting of the Press Association of Canada, at Ottawa, March 10, 1898 (1898)
  • The Making and Marketing of Munsey's Magazine (1899)
  • The Founding of the Munsey Publishing-house: Quarter of a Century Old: the Story of the Argosy, Our First Publication, and Incidentally the Story of Munsey's Magazine (1907)
  • A Great Event for the Argosy (1907)
  • The Story of Argosy (1907)
  • The Daily Newspaper: Its Relation to the Public (1910)
  • Starve the Railroads and We Starve Ourselves (1914)
  • Militant American Journalism (1922)

literature

  • Mike Ashley: The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the beginning to 1950. Liverpool University Press 2000, ISBN 0-85323-855-3 , pp. 21 f ..
  • George Britt: Forty Years, Forty Millions: The Career of Frank A. Munsey. Farrar & Rinehart, New York 1935.
  • Jack H. Colldeweih: Munsey, Frank Andrew. In: American National Biography . Oxford University Press, Oxford 1999, doi : 10.1093 / anb / 9780198606697.article.1602496 .
  • Robert L. Duffus: Mr. Munsey. In: American Mercury , July 2, 1924, pp. 297-304.
  • John Eggeling: Munsey, Frank A. In: John Clute, Peter Nicholls : The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction . 3rd edition (online edition), version dated June 2, 2017.
  • DOS Lowell: A Munsey-Hopkins Genealogy, Being the Ancestry of Andrew Chauncey Munsey and Mary Jane Merritt Hopkins. Boston 1920.
  • Sam Moskowitz (Ed.): Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "The Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York 1970. * Erman Jesse Ridgeway: Frank A. Munsey: An Appreciation. Private print, 1926.
  • RH Titherington: In memoriam: Frank A. Munsey. In: Munsey's Magazine , March 1926, pp. 189-93.

Web links

Commons : Frank Munsey  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Date of issue was December 9th.
  2. ↑ "[He] succeeded in transforming a once-noble profession into an 8-percent security." Quoted from Colldeweih: Munsey, Frank Andrew. In: American National Biography. Oxford 1999.
  3. ↑ Quoted from Colldeweih: Munsey, Frank Andrew. In: American National Biography. Oxford 1999.
  4. ↑ a b Printed in: Tom Roberts (Ed.): Windy City Pulp Stories # 16. Black Dog Books, 1026, ISBN 978-1-884449-70-3 .
personal data
SURNAME Munsey, Frank Andrew
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Munsey, Frank A. (alternative spelling); Munsey, Frank (alternative spelling)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American magazine and newspaper publisher and writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 21, 1854
PLACE OF BIRTH Mercer , Maine
DATE OF DEATH December 22, 1925
Place of death New York City