Puck (magazine)

388x388px|[[Puck Building|The Puck Building in Manhattan, New York City|alt=The Puck Building|thumb]]

Puck was the first successful humor magazine in the United States of colorful cartoons, caricatures and political satire of the issues of the day. It was founded in 1876 as a German-language publication by Joseph Keppler, an Austrian immigrant cartoonist and Adolph Schwarzmann, a German businessman, co-founder and financial backer. Pucks first English-language edition was published in 1877, covering issues like New York City's Tammany Hall, presidential politics, and social issues of the late 19th century to the early 20th century.

"Puckish" means "childishly mischievous". This led Shakespeare's Puck character (from A Midsummer Night's Dream) to be recast as a charming near-naked boy and used as the title of the magazine. Puck was the first magazine to carry illustrated advertising and the first to successfully adopt full-color lithography printing for a weekly publication.

Puck was published from 1876 until 1918.

Publication history

After working with Leslie's Illustrated Weekly in New York – a well-established magazine at the time – Keppler and partner Adolph Schwarzmann (who also work at the same publication), created a satirical magazine called Puck. The weekly magazine was founded by Keppler in St. Louis, Missouri. Keppler and Schwarzmann had begun publishing German-language periodicals in 1869, though failed in 1871, he attempted another cartoon weekly with the same name, Puck. Which lasted until August 1872. Then in 1876, he again began publishing in the same name, and in German. Interested backers wanted Puck in English so he published it in both languages for 15 years until he ceased the German version. Joseph Keppler Jr. then became the editor.

The English-language magazine continued in operation for more than 40 years under several owners and editors, until it was bought by the William Randolph Hearst company in 1916 (ironically, one 1906 cartoon mocked Hearst's bid for Congress with his newspapers' cartoon characters). The Hearst conglomerate discontinued the political material and switched to fine art and social fads. Within 2 years, subscriptions fell off and Hearst stopped publication; the final edition was distributed on September 5, 1918.

London edition

A London edition of Puck was published between January 1889 and June 1890. Among contributors was the English cartoonist and political satirist Tom Merry.

Content

The magazine consisted of 16 pages measuring 10 inches by 13.5 inches with front and back covers in color and a color double-page centerfold. The cover always quoted Puck saying, "What fools these mortals be!" The jaunty symbol of Puck is conceived as a putto in a top hat who admires himself in a hand-mirror. He appears not only on the magazine covers but over the entrance to the Puck Building in New York's Nolita neighborhood, where the magazine was published, as well.

Puck gained notoriety for its witty, humorous cartoons and was the first to publish weekly cartoons using chromolithography in place of wood engraving, offering three cartoons instead of one. According to historian Samuel Thomas, himself a Catholic: <blockquote>[I]n an age of partisan politics and partisan journalism, Puck became the nation's premier journal of graphic humor and political satire, played an important role as a non-partisan crusader for good government and the triumph of American constitutional ideals. Its prime targets, however, were not just corrupt machine politicians. The magazine included as well ...[the] political agenda of the Catholic Church, especially its new Pope, Leo XIII....Tammany Hall... was all the more dangerous to Puck because, beginning in the 1870s, Irish Catholics dominated it.... In cartoons and editorials spanning two decades, the magazine blasted and often conjoined both Tammany and the papacy with invidious comparisons that left few readers in doubt as to their sympathies.</blockquote>

Contributors

Over the years, Puck employed many early cartoonists of note, including, Louis Dalrymple, Bernhard Gillam, Friedrich Graetz, Livingston Hopkins, Frederick Burr Opper, Louis Glackens, Albert Levering, Frank Nankivell, J. S. Pughe, Rose O'Neill, Charles Taylor, James Albert Wales, and Eugene Zimmerman.

Puck Building

Puck was housed from 1887 in the landmark Chicago-style, Romanesque Revival Puck Building at Lafayette and Houston streets, New York City. The steel-frame building was designed by architects Albert and Herman Wagner in 1885, as the world's largest lithographic presswork under a single roof, with its own electricity-generating dynamo. It takes up a full block on Houston Street, bounded by Lafayette and Mulberry streets.

Legacy

Years after its conclusion, the "Puck" name and slogan were revived as part of the Comic Weekly Sunday comic section that ran on Hearst's newspaper chain beginning in September 1931 and continuing until the 1970s. It was then revived again by Hearst's Los Angeles Herald Examiner, which folded in 1989.

Gallery of Puck cartoons

File:Schurz Forester1.jpg|U.S. Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz accosts Senator James G. Blaine chopping down a tree in the forest, c. 1878

File:Puck - Carl Edler von Stur - Go West! 1881-2.jpg|European Royalties: Go West! (after assassination of Alexander II of Russia), March 30, 1881

File:Emoticons Puck 1881 with Text.png|Emoticons, March 30, 1881

File:PUCK1881-Joseph Keppler-President Garfield (NYPL).jpg|President James A. Garfield, Auf seinem Posten gefällt, July 6, 1881

File:PuckMagazineCoverGoneToMeetJohnKelly11091881.jpg|Gone to meet John Kelly (Hugh McLaughlin, the Irish Catholic political "boss" of Brooklyn) being deposited in "Hades" (hell), November 9, 1881 cover

File:PUCK-Monopoly Millionaires Dividing the Country.jpg|German edition: Monopoly Millionaires Dividing the Country (William Henry Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Cyrus West Field, Russell Sage; Andrew Carnegie), 1885

File:Joseph Ferdinand, Keppler Rapid Transit to Sheol 1888 Cornell CUL PJM 1097 01.jpg|Rapid Transit to Sheol—Where We Are All Going According to the Reverend Dr. Morgan Dix by Joseph Ferdinand Keppler, 1888

File:Puck112188c.jpg|Nasty little printer's devils, 1888

File:Puck magazine cover 2 May 1894 - In the cyclone cellar, waiting for fair weather.jpg|Cyclone as metaphor for political revolution during U.S. mid-term elections of 1894

File:School Begins (Puck Magazine 1-25-1899).jpg|School Begins by Louis Dalrymple, January 25, 1899

File:PuckCartoon-TeddyRoosevelt-05-23-1906.jpg|The Infant Hercules and the Standard Oil Serpents by Frank A. Nankivell, depicting U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt grabbing the head of Nelson W. Aldrich and the snake-like body of John D. Rockefeller, May 23, 1906

File:Paris in half-mourning by Ralph Burton 1915.jpg|"Paris in Half-Mourning" by Ralph Barton, 1915

File:Henry Mayer, The Awakening, 1915 Cornell CUL PJM 1176 01 - Restoration.jpg|The Awakening (depicting the universal suffrage movement) by Henry "Hy" Mayer, 1915

File:John Bull's dilemma - Dalrymple. LCCN2012648689 (cropped).jpg|"John Bull's dilemma": "It's 'ard to 'ave to disturb 'im–'e's such a good customer!" by Louis Dalrymple, 1895

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Notes

References

External links

U Virginia collection, color cartoons
Puck at archive.org (black and white, scanned from microfilms)
Gallery of 1877 Puck Magazine caricatures by Joseph Keppler
Cartoons from Puck featuring U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt
Guide to the Samuel Halperin Puck and Judge Cartoon Collection, 1879–1903, Special Collections Research Center, Estelle and Melvin Gelman Library, The George Washington University
The Online Book Page archive listings for Puck in both English and German archived by HathiTrust. (black and white)