The Press: Popular No More

Many a magazine lives a generation, few live two. Last week, having completed 28 years of usefulness, Popular Magazine appeared for the last time. Street & Smith, largest producers of pulp-paper thrillers, merged (and buried) Popular Magazine with another of their 15 periodicals—Complete Stories. The end of Popular, like the end of Everybody’s, rang the knell of another semi-pretentious sheet which could not compete with the innumerable sporadic, cheap magazines which frankly pander yarns about gunmen, speakeasies, dope. Popular-Complete Stories, beginning with the December issue, will be smaller than Popular, will sell for 15¢ instead of 25¢.

The history of Popular Magazine is the story of Editor Charles Agnew MacLean’s life. Editor MacLean was born in Ireland in 1880. Aged five, he was taken to the U.S. His father was a newspaperman who scraped enough money together for Son Charles to go to college. Charles demurred, made his parents move into a better house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Fired from the New York Sun, fired from the Times, in 1903 Charles Agnew MacLean went to work for Street & Smith. Year after he was put in charge of Smith’s, Ainslie’s and the newly-founded Popular Magazine. One of his first assistants was Theodore Dreiser. He did not like Dreiser. Nobody did. But for $500 he bought the plates of Sister Carrie which had been shelved by Doubleday, Page & Co. He later sold them to another publisher, gave the proceeds to Author Dreiser.

The number of famed and near-famed writers whom Editor MacLean raised from oblivion is astonishing. He lifted the late H.C. Witwer from a $30-a-week copy-reader’s job on the Sun. He helped Albert Payson Terhune with his first work. He ”discovered” Zane Grey, Louis Joseph Vance, Charles E. Van Loan. Of his output he said: “Much of it is not literature. Little of it is great literature. It comes so straight and fresh from the loom of life that it may well be imperfect in spots and lacking that finish which a more meticulous taste might provide.”

Editor MacLean knew a good glass of wine, a good cigar, but spent most of his money for Scotch whiskey. It killed him in 1928. Popular was never the same afterward.