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Last updated on Tuesday, November 20, 2018
(UNDATED) - Nearly 200 years after its inception, The Saturday Evening Post has unveiled a new website with a digital archive of its issues dating back to 1821, as well as a gallery of its signature covers.
The Post, one of the longest-running American magazines, has recreated itself a number of times. It first appeared as a magazine densely packed with news and features intended for male readers. Then it became a general-interest, family publication with eye-catching cover art.
Now it's a staple of American culture that has published literary giants including Ray Bradbury, Agatha Christie, and William Faulkner and promoted the work of master artists like Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth.
The idea to digitize the magazine's archive was spurred by Rockwell's death in 1978. His work -- folksy illustrations of small-town America -- was suddenly in high demand. But searching through the 322 covers he had done for The Post was proving difficult, said Joan SerVaas, the chief executive and president of The Saturday Evening Post Society, who was involved in the licensing of the magazine's artwork.
To make her job easier, Ms. SerVaas began photographing every cover preserved in the archive in 1986. And she was fascinated.
Going through them, she would find "some incredible examples of landscapes, seascapes, and your typical narrative stories like Rockwell did that became so popular," she said.
As technology progressed, Ms. SerVaas and her team were better able to scan and digitize the catalog. The process took a decade -- and lots of manual labor -- to complete.
Now subscribers around the world can scroll through half a million pages of The Post and go through more than 3,500 covers by artist, year or theme. Nonsubscribers can peruse cover collections organized by subjects like bad neighbors, Halloween and back to school.
Ms. SerVaas mainly credits two people for the magazine's rich history: the publisher Cyrus Curtis, who bought The Post in 1897, and George Horace Lorimer, the editor hired by Curtis who would make the magazine famous for its colorful covers.
Information New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/
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