For easier understanding by you whose magazine memories do not go back to the turn of the century it should be told that we were then carrying a Gibson Girl hangover from the Gay Nineties and were but a few years removed from a time when there were only three standard monthlies: _Harper’s_, _Scribner’s_, and _Century_; and seven illustrated weeklies: _Harper’s_, _Frank Leslie’s_, _Harper’s Bazaar_, _Police Gazette_, _Puck_, _Judge_ and the old _Life_,--magazines and weeklies that were seldom given display other than in hotels and railroad depots, where they were shown in competition with the then-popular paper-covered novels. In the mid-Eighties all monthlies, weeklies, books and booklets were hand-fed, folded, collated and bound; halftones were in an experimental stage; advertising agencies, if any existed, were not noticeable in Chicago, and advertising of a national character used only quarter-page cover space. But something in the air already quickened imagination, and the Nineties gave us more magazines and better display. In 1907, magazines were shedding swaddling clothes and getting into rompers; the _Saturday Evening Post_ had cast off its pseudo-Benjamin Franklin dress and adopted a live editorial policy that was winning readers and advertising; Edward Bok had ventured a Harrison Fisher head on a _Ladies’ Home Journal_ cover and won a fifty-thousand gain in newsstand sales, and Robert Collier had built a subscription-book premium into a national weekly. [Illustration] THE MAGAZINE WORLD--COLLIER’S AND OTHERS On a Saturday afternoon in 1907, believing myself alone, for the offices and plant had closed at twelve, I was standing at a drafting table making up the Thanksgiving issue of _Collier’s_ when Mr. Collier entered. He became intrigued with proofs of decorative units being combined for initial-letter and page borders, as had earlier been done with similar material in designing a cover, and asked for some to take home and play with on the morrow. Robert Collier was that kind of a boss--a joy! Of the Thanksgiving issue Royal Cortissoz wrote: “This week’s number has has just turned up and I cannot refrain from sending you my congratulations. The cover is bully; it’s good decoration, it’s appropriate, it’s everything that is first rate. The decorations all through are charming. More power to your elbow. It does my heart good to see _Collier’s_ turning up in such splendid shape.” There were other favorable comments--but no noticeable jump in newsstand sales.