The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of the Magazine

Recently, I undertook some freelance work for the Arkansas Times, sifting through their back issues to find some articles to be republished in their fiftieth anniversary special—both some oddities of the past and some article still relevant today. Not only was it a fascinating journey back in time, but it also offered an insight into how a periodical like this stays around. The Times, for one, has changed formats from a biweekly newsprint rag to a monthly glossy magazine to a weekly newspaper (following the demise of the Arkansas Gazette) and back into a glossy monthly magazine. But it kept going, even as other publications foundered. (A nearly complete run of the Times can be accessed in the Research Room at the CALS Roberts Library.)

One of those other short-lived publications was something I learned about only by reading those back issues of the Times. It was a literary journal called Black and White: A Review of the Arts, the founding of which was detailed in the December 1976 issue of the Times, but after that point, nothing more. A WorldCat search turned up what is apparently the only extant collection of Black and White at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and I haven’t gone over there to do more digging; it may have only lasted one issue.

It is genuinely hard to keep a publication going without some kind of institutional support. Bernie Babcock would know. From 1906 to 1910, she published a quarterly literary (and boosterism) journal called the Little Rock Sketch Book. The journal was universally praised as handsome and a fine representation of Arkansas, but as an article in the February 9, 1908, issue of the Arkansas Democrat pointed out, she started the magazine “without 5 cent capital,” which “was a very daring venture for a woman with a family to take care of, but to use her own words, she has coddled this baby magazine along, in spite of the fearful mortality among its kind.” How did she do it? The Democrat notes that Babcock alone served as “editor, business manager, collector and office boy.”

When Bernie Babcock left for Chicago in 1910, taking a more lucrative job, certain local cultural leaders talked about trying to keep the Sketch Book going, but apparently none were willing to dedicate the same long hours that she found necessary for the effort. Staff members at the Roberts Library have digitized and placed online several issues of the Sketch Book, available here, which provide not only an interesting glimpse into the past, but also some excellent source material about state and local history, especially defunct institutions in Little Rock such as the zoo at Forest Park.

A more recent digitization effort has involved the monthly periodical Dixie Magazine. “Dedicated to the Traditions, Memories and Development of the South,” this magazine was published from 1925 to 1929 in Little Rock and sought to boost the economy and improve the image of the South in general, and Arkansas in particular. The masthead for early issues state that the magazine’s main editorial offices were in Little Rock and in Dallas, Texas, with branch offices in Atlanta, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Memphis and Chattanooga, Tennessee.

A 1925 article on the launch of the magazine reported, “Advance subscriptions in large numbers already have been received from every Southern State, and several Eastern, Northern, and Middle West States, and the editors believe that in a short time its circulation will be national.” The early editorial staff included an array of contemporary luminaries, including Florence McRaven, who was a leader in the Arkansas Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Little Rock Drama League, the Arkansas Authors and Composers Society, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Women of the Ku Klux Klan; she would later serve as a member of the Arkansas House of Representatives from 1927 to 1930. However, by the following year, the Dixie Publishing Company was apparently publishing exclusively out of Little Rock, and the only people listed on the masthead were Mrs. N. B. Ford of Dallas as the owner and William McComb as acting editor.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any periodical dedicated to boosting the image of a particular state or region must be in want of some pretty horrendous poetry, and Dixie Magazine was no exception, featuring the poem “Out Here in Arkansas” by Josie Frazee Cappleman in the December 1925 issue, a verse of which follows:

Here are granite mounts and gold mines—
At least we hear there are—
And coal-beds, without bottoms,
Outstretching deep and far;
Here are gems of pearl and diamond,
Without blemish, fault or flaw;
And there but few the treasures
Out here in Arkansas.

An editorial printed on the cover of the January 1929 issue encouraged the state to set aside the funding necessary to pursue a program of tick eradication and thus foster the dairy industry: “Arkansas is being deprived, through the 20 ticky counties, of an opportunity to increase the state income and wealth.” The concern with developing dairies in the state would lead, with the July 1929 issue, to the magazine changing its name to Dixie Dairies, subtitled, “A Magazine of Southern Development.” You read that right—Dairies. At first, I myself read it as Dixie Diaries, a name that would be a logical development from the generically named Dixie Magazine.

But no, we’re talking about cows here. The announcement of the name change noted, “One reason for doing this is that we believe as we have said editorially the most rapid accretion to public and private wealth in Arkansas will come through the development of dairying,” but added that the general editorial policies of the magazine would remain unchanged “other than in presenting more fully the possibilities of dairying and also to show our people how they can make money by keeping a few or many dairy cows in Arkansas.” In 1929, Dixie Dairies sponsored the second-place prize, $25 in gold, for a contest at the Arkansas State Fair “for the Arkansas cow which produces the greatest amount of butterfat.”

The enhanced focus upon dairying appears not to have made the magazine operation more lucrative, and the publication seems to have folded either with, or soon after, the December 1929 issue.

There are numerous short-lived publications like the Sketch Book and Dixie Magazine that were important for their time and place, bringing together people with a shared concern for their state, and also showcasing the idea that Arkansas could be sophisticated enough to support this kind of cultural endeavor. But as the Arkansas Democrat noted, many of these magazines and journals experience a “fearful mortality” and have lifespans much more fiercely contracted than either of these early twentieth-century publications. The Butler Center’s Arkansas Zine Collection certainly showcases this from a more modern perspective, though the creators of these DIY zines had aims not as magisterial as did Bernie Babcock, as they were serving a niche culture instead of the whole state.

But the aim to publish, to represent both state and self, has a long history here in Arkansas, even if most of these efforts have fallen by the wayside over time. And that’s a history you, too, can experience through both the physical and digital collections of the CALS Butler Center for Arkansas History/Roberts Library. I hope you find it all as fascinating as I do.

By Guy Lancaster, editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas

TAGS

Butler Banner Fall 2024