Description: 1954 CHILDREN BIRTHDAY PARTY PINTAIL DONKEY PONY RIDE STEVEN DOHANOS COVER 29918 DATE OF THIS ** ORIGINAL ** ILLUSTRATED COVER: 1954SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS/DESCRIPTIVE WORDS: LOOKS LIKE THE PARTY IS GETTING RAINED OUT AND THE KIDS ARE TEARING UP THE GARAGE WHILE THE PONY IS OUT IN THE RAIN. The Saturday Evening Post is an American magazine, currently published six times a year. It was issued weekly under this title from 1897 until 1963, then every two weeks until 1969. From the 1920s to the 1960s, it was one of the most widely circulated and influential magazines within the American middle class, with fiction, non-fiction, cartoons and features that reached two million homes every week. The magazine declined in readership through the 1960s, and in 1969 The Saturday Evening Post folded for two years before being revived as a quarterly publication with an emphasis on medical articles in 1971. As of the late 2000s, The Saturday Evening Post is published six times a year by the Saturday Evening Post Society, which purchased the magazine in 1982. The magazine was redesigned in 2013. History Rise The Saturday Evening Post was first published in 1821 in the same printing shop at 53 Market Street in Philadelphia where the Benjamin Franklin-founded Pennsylvania Gazette had been published in the 18th century. While the Gazette ceased publication in 1800, ten years after Franklin's death, the Post links its history to the original magazine. Heyday The Post grew to become the most widely circulated weekly magazine in America. The magazine gained prominent status under the leadership of its longtime editor George Horace Lorimer (1899–1937). The Saturday Evening Post published current event articles, editorials, human interest pieces, humor, illustrations, a letter column, poetry (with contributions submitted by readers), single-panel gag cartoons (including Hazel by Ted Key) and stories by the leading writers of the time. It was known for commissioning lavish illustrations and original works of fiction. Illustrations were featured on the cover and embedded in stories and advertising. Some Post illustrations continue to be reproduced as posters or prints, especially those by Norman Rockwell. In 1954 it published its first articles on the role of the US in deposing Mohammad Mosaddegh, Prime Minister of Iran, in 1953. The article was based on materials leaked by CIA director Allen Dulles. Decline The Post readership began to decline in the late 1950s and 1960s. In general, the decline of general interest magazines was blamed on television, which competed for advertisers and readers' attention. The Post had problems retaining readers: the public's taste in fiction was changing, and the Post's conservative politics and values appealed to a declining number of people. Content by popular writers became harder to obtain. Prominent authors drifted away to newer magazines offering more money and status. As a result, the Post published more articles on current events and cut costs by replacing illustrations with photographs for covers and advertisements. Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts The magazine's publisher, Curtis Publishing Company, lost a landmark defamation suit, Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts 388 U.S. 130 (1967), resulting from an article, and was ordered to pay U.S.$3,060,000 in damages to the plaintiff. The Post article implied that football coaches Paul "Bear" Bryant and Wally Butts conspired to fix a game between the University of Alabama and the University of Georgia. Both coaches sued Curtis Publishing Co. for defamation, each initially asking for $10 million. Bryant eventually settled for $300,000, while Butts' case went to the Supreme Court, which held that libel damages may be recoverable (in this instance against a news organization) when the injured party is a non-public official, if the plaintiff can prove that the defendant was guilty of a reckless lack of professional standards when examining allegations for reasonable credibility. (Butts was eventually awarded $460,000.) William Emerson was promoted to editor-in-chief in 1965 and remained in the position until the magazine's demise in 1969. Closure In 1968, Martin Ackerman, a specialist in troubled firms, became president of Curtis after lending it $5 million. Although at first he said there were no plans to shut down the magazine, soon he halved its circulation, purportedly in an attempt to increase the quality of the audience, and then subsequently did shut it down. In announcing that the February 8, 1969, issue would be the magazine's last, Curtis executive Martin Ackerman stated that the magazine had lost $5 million in 1968 and would lose a projected $3 million in 1969. In a meeting with employees after the magazine's closure had been announced, Emerson thanked the staff for their professional work and promised "to stay here and see that everyone finds a job". At a March 1969 post-mortem on the magazine's closing, Emerson stated that The Post "was a damn good vehicle for advertising" with competitive renewal rates and readership reports and expressed what The New York Times called "understandable bitterness" in wishing "that all the one-eyed critics will lose their other eye". Otto Friedrich, the magazine's last managing editor, blamed the death of The Post on Curtis. In his Decline and Fall (Harper & Row, 1970), an account of the magazine's final years (1962–69), he argued that corporate management was unimaginative and incompetent. Friedrich acknowledges that The Post faced challenges while the tastes of American readers changed over the course of the 1960s, but he insisted that the magazine maintained a standard of good quality and was appreciated by readers. Reemergence In 1970, control of the debilitated Curtis Publishing Company was acquired from the estate of Cyrus Curtis by Indianapolis industrialist Beurt SerVaas. SerVaas relaunched the Post the following year on a quarterly basis as a kind of nostalgia magazine. In early 1982, ownership of the Post was transferred to the Benjamin Franklin Literary and Medical Society, founded in 1976 by the Post's then-editor, Dr. Corena "Cory" SerVaas (wife of Beurt SerVaas). The magazine's core focus was now health and medicine; indeed, the magazine's website originally noted that the "credibility of The Saturday Evening Post has made it a valuable asset for reaching medical consumers and for helping medical researchers obtain family histories. In the magazine, national health surveys are taken to further current research on topics such as cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, ulcerative colitis, spina bifida, and bipolar disorder." Ownership of the magazine was later transferred to the Saturday Evening Post Society; Dr. SerVaas headed both organizations. The range of topics covered in the magazine's articles is now wide, suitable for a general readership. By 1991, Curtis Publishing Company had been renamed Curtis International, a subsidiary of SerVaas Inc., and had become an importer of audiovisual equipment. Today the Post is published six times a year by the Saturday Evening Post Society, which claims 501(c)(3) non-profit organization status. With the January/February 2013 issue, the Post launched a major makeover of the publication, including a new cover design and efforts to increase the magazine's profile, in response to a general public misbelief that it was no longer in existence. The magazine's new logo is an update of a logo it had used beginning in 1942. As of October 2018, the complete archive of the magazine is available online. The heyday of the Saturday Evening Post is now quite a few years behind us, but the magazine held such a large audience in America that most people are still familiar with it today. Let’s play a little word association: Saturday Evening Post — umm, Norman Rockwell! Yes, that’s right, but there’s so much more to the story of the Post than just Rockwell. There is Curtis and Lorimer and Leyendecker, three names that should at least reign equal with Rockwell’s. We’ll take a look at what each of these names meant to the Post on this page. The history of the Saturday Evening Post is in itself a tidy history of the magazine in America. The Saturday Evening Post began in 1821, but as if that didn’t date far enough back to impress you it is claimed that it started up in the same printer’s shop that Ben Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette began in in 1728. Is that American enough for you? Anyway, as collectors we are not all that interested in these early days of the Saturday Evening Post other than as supplemental background information. Where our interest begins to pique is still pretty far back though, in 1897, when Cyrus H.K. Curtis purchased the Post for $1,000. Cyrus Curtis Where Curtis’ genius as publisher lay was in his hands-off attitude towards his magazines. He had already implemented this strategy in running his first magazine, the Ladies’ Home Journal. Originally just a column called “Women and the Home” in his newspaper the Tribune and Farmer, the Ladies’ Home Journal became a separate supplement to the paper in December 1883. Curtis’ wife, Louisa Knapp, edited it until her resignation in 1889. That’s when Curtis gave it over to his first editorial all-star, Edward William Bok. As for the Saturday Evening Post, Curtis was taking over a sinking ship. Ad revenue from the publication was just $7,000 in the year Curtis purchased it. Thirty years later, in 1927, ad revenue would top $50,000,000. Cy Curtis resurrected the Saturday Evening Post and made it both the most read and most beloved magazine in America during the 1920’s and 30’s. But before those successes he needed to find an editor. George Horace Lorimer was brought in to run the Post while Curtis sailed to Europe in search of his new editor. When Lorimer sent Curtis an issue in order to keep his boss informed of how he was handling things, Curtis realized that he already had his man. George Horace Lorimer would be the editor of the Saturday Evening Post from 1899 through 1936. When he took over the circulation of the Post was just over 2,000 copies. Under Lorimer not only would it be the first magazine with a circulation surpassing 1,000,000 copies, it would push itself over the 3,000,000 mark by the end of his tenure. What did Lorimer do to cause this amazing turn around? He implemented changes almost immediately. The September 30, 1899 issue would be expanded to 30 pages and for the first time have a separate cover. Previously the cover of the magazine was page 1. Lorimer produced a two-color red and black cover featuring a painting by George Gibbs. By adding a cover Lorimer was also creating three prominent empty pages: the inside of the front cover and both sides of the back cover. These pages were filled with advertising. Inside the Saturday Evening Post Advertising would fuel the success of the Saturday Evening Post. The bottom line for magazines in the past had been circulation–getting paid for selling copies. The Post under Curtis sold for just a nickel to boost circulation numbers and then made its real profits on the advertising. By the teens issues would fatten to over 200 pages and would contain up to 60% advertising. That’s how Curtis and Lorimer managed to hit that magic $50,000,000 ad revenue number by the late twenties. Inside the covers of the Post was fiction targeted at the masses. The fiction of the Saturday Evening Post was not highbrow like The New Yorker or even literary like Harper’s and the Atlantic. It was popular, intended to strike a chord with the most possible people, not the most educated. The magazine would publish fiction by famous writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ring Lardner, and Sinclair Lewis, but the main offerings of the Post were popular pieces by writers who are lesser known today: Albert Payson Terhune, Octavus Roy Cohen, Mary Roberts Rinehart and Clarence Budington Kelland were all short story and serialized regulars in the Post. Besides it’s fiction the Saturday Evening Post offered feature stories and humor. When founded in the 19th Century the Post proclaimed itself neutral in politics, under Lorimer it would take on the editor’s pro-business, Republican personality. Probably the main competition of the Post would become Collier’s when it was under William Chenery. Collier’s had been founded in 1888 and survived until 1957. They were a heavily fiction based magazine though they also did some muckraking in their features. Saturday Evening Post Covers But where the Saturday Evening Post separated itself from Collier’s and other competitors was by cementing its own identity through those famed covers. At first a lot of the covers would contain an illustration which corresponded in some way to one of the stories or features inside. Lorimer would quickly abandon this strategy and instead select covers which evoked those same masses with whom he was trying to connect the contents to. He let the covers stand out as a representation of the magazine as a whole. Each issue of the Saturday Evening Post was intended from cover to cover and contents included to represent the same America that its readers were living in. The cover artists are some of the most famous illustrators of the 20th Century. Besides Rockwell there was J.C. Leyendecker, Harrison Fisher, James Montgomery Flagg, Steven Dohanos, Mead Schaffer and many others over the years. This page is intended more as an overview of the Saturday Evening Post as a whole, but those artists will be detailed on another part of the site. Following is just a brief overview of their relationship to the Post. Prior to Rockwell’s emergence, Leyendecker was the top cover artist at the Post. Leyendecker handled most of the holiday covers from the very beginning, his most famous being his New Year’s covers which began featuring his New Year’s Baby with the December 29, 1906 issue. Over time Leyendecker would be credited with over 300 of the Post’s covers. Norman Rockwell’s first Post cover was the May 20, 1916 issue. He would be the top cover artist at the Saturday Evening Post for most of the rest of the magazines history, inking his last cover with the May 25, 1963 issue. Rockwell’s style was the narrative illustration, pictures which told a story. Probably his most famous cover was the May 29, 1943 issue featuring Rosie the Riveter. It was Rosie’s only appearance on a Post cover. Leyendecker and Rockwell were definitely the main cover contributors during the magazines glory years. Between the two of them they were responsible for one-third of all covers during the 1920’s as well as the top two contributors in the 30’s. Rockwell had the credit on the Post’s first four-color cover, February 6, 1926. Leyendecker kept up his holiday covers until his last, January 2, 1943. The Post in the 1930’s and 40’s As for the men in charge, the Saturday Evening Post continued to be run by the Curtis Company, but Cyrus Curtis himself died in 1933. George Horace Lorimer stayed on as editor well into the 1930’s, but was severely disappointed both in general and with the Post’s readership by the re-election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. Having run the Post for so many years as a pro-business Republican, Lorimer was disillusioned by the changing times and stepped down as editor at the end of 1936. Wesley Stout took over with the first issue of 1937. Stout was in a tough position. As was only natural, he wanted to leave his own mark on the Post, but at the same time how could he alter Lorimer’s policies without upsetting the successful magazine? Stout stuck with Leyendecker and Rockwell as cover artists but tried out a host of new illustrators on the issues that weren’t handled by the top pair. Stout also brought the photographic cover back to the Post, using the work of Ivan Dmitri. Even Dmitri’s photographs would bring their own style to the Post, as they were usually close-ups, often snapped from strange angles. Leyendecker and Rockwell would outlast Stout’s tenure. Issues of the Post had been shrinking since the Depression. Since the size of the magazine was predicated largely upon advertisements it’s quite clear that the shrinking size of the Post meant shrinking ad revenue for the Curtis Company. Stout was out, Ben Hibbs was in. Hibbs would preside over the Post from 1942 through 1961. He quickly changed the logo of the Post. After the War Hibbs selected covers that depicted the American post-war world; this meant lots of cars and views of the suburbs. Family continued to be the key element to which the Post would appeal. Hibbs tried out new artists as well, but he quickly settled on a few and he stuck with them. During a four year period in the late 1940’s he would use only 16 different cover artists and only half of those would contribute on a regular basis. Besides Rockwell key cover artists under Hibbs were Mead Shaeffer, Steven Dohanos, and Constantin Alajalov. It was also during the 1950’s that Rockwell would begin doing some portrait covers. The Demise of the Saturday Evening Post Profits for the Saturday Evening Post fell throughout the 50’s. Hibbs would be replaced in 1961 by Robert Fuoss. He implemented a new logo, but both the logo and Fuoss’ time in charge would be short. During the 1960’s the Post forsook a key element of its personality as it shifted to photographic covers. It wasn’t this loss that killed the Post though, just like LIFE and LOOK a great deal of the credit to the demise of The Saturday Evening Post can be handed to television. The last issue was February 8, 1969. The Post would return in the 1970’s as a nostalgia magazine. It even had the original logo and would sometimes reprint Rockwell and Leyendecker covers. But the Saturday Evening Post that we are going to concern ourselves with as collectors is that original Curtis Post, 1897-1969, a good long life. ILLUSTRATOR/ARTIST: Stevan Dohanos, born May 18, 1907 in Lorain, Ohio, grew up as a great admirer of Norman Rockwell, going so far as to copy his Saturday Evening Post cover illustrations in crayon that he sold to friends, relatives, and co-workers. Little did Stevan know, he would develop a close personal friendship with Rockwell as his own art graced the Post’s cover 123 times over the course of his lifetime. Dohanos was the third of nine children born to Hungarian immigrants Elizabeth and Andras Dohanos. His upbringing in a midwestern steel town would later influence the cultivation of his artistic style showing the normalcy and realism of American life. While inspired by Rockwell’s talent, Dohanos became an “American Realist” who depicted everyday life as it was. He was most heavily influenced by the work of Edward Hopper, and chose not to idealize American life the way Rockwell did. Dohanos realized his love of art fairly early in life, selling calendars and illustration copies for $1.00 to $3.00 apiece while he worked in a grocery store and later at an office job. He began his formal education by taking correspondence classes through the International Correspondence School. Soon after, the artist took night classes at the Cleveland School of Art where he received a scholarship to complete his formal art studies. During and after art school, the young Dohanos worked in a Cleveland advertising firm, then travelled around the country painting wall murals before heading to New York City to work as a commercial artist. He eventually moved to the artist colony of Westport, Connecticut where he found inspiration in the everyday lives of his neighbors. While working in the city, Dohanos picked up advertising work from clients such as Four Roses Whiskey, Maxwell House Coffee, Pan Am Airlines, Cannon Towels, Olin Industries, and John Hancock Insurance. His work was featured in Esquire, Medical Times, McCall’s, and Colliers prior to his first successful submission to The Saturday Evening Post. In September of 1938, he married his longtime sweetheart, Margit Kovacs, and had two children, Peter and Paul. His first Post cover, the March 7, 1942 issue, was a well-received wartime image of air raid searchlights from an artillery battery. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the artist’s workload for The Post increased, garnering a contract for roughly a dozen covers a year. During World War II, Dohanos aided the war effort by painting recruitment posters and wall murals for federal buildings. He also designed stamps for the federal government, starting during the Roosevelt administration, and staying in the profession the rest of his life. As magazine covers turned toward photography and away from illustration, Dohanos quickly changed careers. He did film art for such classics as White Christmas and was the chairman of the National Stamp Advisory Committee where he oversaw the art design for over 300 stamps. He held the position throughout the administrations of 7 presidents and 9 Postmaster Generals. His depictions include presidential portraits, the now collectible NATO commemorative stamps from 1959, and the 1967 John F. Kennedy commemorative stamp. Stevan Dohanos found beauty in everyday life, choosing to focus on “the location and trappings of the American dream, not those who populated it.” Elevated to lofty status as a famous Saturday Evening Post illustrator, Dohanos’s works now adorn the walls, halls, and galleries of The Cleveland Museum, The New Britain Museum of American Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Dartmouth College, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and various federal post offices across the United States. He died July 4th, 1994 at the age of 87, leaving behind his second wife Joan and their son, Anthony. ADVERT SIZE: SEE RULER SIDES IN PHOTO FOR DIMENSIONS ( ALL DIMENSIONS IN INCHES) **For multiple purchases please wait for our combined invoice. Shipping discount are ONLY available with this method. Thank You. At BRANCHWATER BOOKS we look for rare & unusual ADVERTISING, COVERS + PRINTS of commercial graphics from throughout the world. 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