Cyrus Curtis grew up in a poor family in Portland and went on to found the Curtis Publishing Company, headquartered in Philadelphia. He became wealthy by publishing the two most iconic monthly magazines of the first half of the twentieth century, Ladies Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post, and a string of newspapers. He bought the rights to the nearly defunct Saturday Evening Post, established by Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century, but which had long since fallen on hard times. He built up the circulation of both publications to between 3-4 million copies a month, an unheard-of accomplishment in his day or our own.
Edward Bok was Curtis’s son-in-law — he married the boss’s daughter a number of years after Curtis tapped him to become the Editor-in-Chief of the Ladies Home Journal after the original editor, Curtis’s wife, Louisa Knapp Curtis, stepped down. Louisa decided it was more important to spend time with her teen-age daughter than continue an equal partnership with her husband in their expanding publishing venture.
Two delightful books — one of them, Bok’s autobiography, won a Pulitzer prize in 1921 — remind us of the kind of simple virtues that spelled success for ambitious young men and women during a simpler era in American life. But the lessons still speak volumes today.
Cyrus Curtis’s story is an archetype of poor-boy-makes-good-through-honest-hard-work-and-good-character. It is an impossible story not to admire. He began as a paperboy after he asked his mother for “a little change” during Portland’s Fourth of July celebrations. The wife of a man of artistic temperament who could not or did not provide for his family, she answered, “If you want money to spend, why not go and earn it?” The practical boy wanted to know, “If I earn money, can I keep it all for myself and spend it on what I want?” “You may,” she said.
As Cyrus contemplated how to begin earning some change, he happened upon a friend who was stuck with three copies of one of Portland’s newspapers, The Courier, which sold for three cents each. He offered the friend three cents for them and four hours later had nine cents in his pocket. It was 1862 and Cyrus was 12 and he occasionally afterwards remarked that he quite literally “started with three cents.”
After four years of delivering papers, Cyrus dreamed of publishing one. He found a partner and the two of them started their own newspaper for a more youthful audience, Young America. But as Bok wrote about his father-in-law’s first venture, the paper did not break upon “an expectant public. And as the public did not expect it, it had not been looking for it, and when it looked at the first issue it did not seem anxious to buy it.” The partners did not know how to pay the first printer’s bill of five dollars since sales were so slow. So Cyrus went hunting for a printing press and found one for two and a half dollars. They bought fifteen dollars’ worth of type. As Bok wrote, “”I cannot write of this little boy’s venture … without turning the book of this same boy’s life a few pages ahead and considering his latest purchase of a press: a single press measuring one hundred and thirty-five feet long and costing over three hundred thousand dollars — and the combined printing plants now owned by this boy total a value of over eight millions of dollars.”
In contrast Edward Bok came to America as an immigrant from a family that had roots on one of the remote Frisian islands on the Netherlands’ Baltic coast. Bok’s father brought the family to America in 1870 after losing his fortune in an investment scheme when Edward was six. Bok’s father was reduced to marginal work after the family settled in Brooklyn. Edward was forced to leave school at age 13 and went to work as a telegraph boy for Western Union to help support his family, but he was determined to educate himself and bought an encyclopedia with his first earnings. He read an article about James A. Garfield, who was then a presidential aspirant, and wrote him to inquire about some of the facts in the encyclopedia’s biography. Garfield was evidently charmed and wrote back a warm letter that Bok’s father told him to keep because it would be valuable some day and Bok immediately began writing to other eminent Americans. Incredible as it seems, the 14-year-old was soon corresponding with Gen. Ulysses Grant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain and others. Quite an education for a self-taught lad.
As his correspondence with major literary and political figures increased, Bok conceived of a strategy of sending “syndicate letters” to groups of newspapers. His big break came when he began approaching a few women writers to write a weekly letter on women’s topics and then men to write on women’s topics and was soon supplying a full page “woman’s department” to 90 newspapers while working fulltime first for the New York publisher Henry Holt and then Charles Scribner. He left Scribner’s to start his own publication, Brooklyn Magazine where he eventually attracted the interest of Cyrus Curtis. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Under Bok’s leadership, the Ladies Home Journal became the first magazine in the world to have a million subscribers. He summed up his editorial strategy in his autobiography eloquently (if you can forgive his overuse of a limiting pronoun): “The editor is the pivot of a magazine. On him everything turns. If his gauge on the public is correct, readers will come: they cannot help coming to the man who has something to say himself, or who presents writers who have. And if the reader comes, the advertiser must come.”
Bok retired in 1919 after 30 years as editor. Earlier, Cyrus Curtis’s passion for recreation on the water led him to purchase land and build a summer cottage in Rockport, Maine. Curtis then eventually brought his yacht Lyndonia to Camden Harbor where it became an iconic fixture. Bok and Curtis and their families were devoted to the Maine coast and they became quiet and thoughtful philanthropists whose good works are evident today in countless institutions from Portland to Rockport and Camden.
A Man From Maine by Edward W. Bok, Charles Scribner’s Sons, N.Y., N.Y. 1923
The Americanization of Edward Bok — The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After by Edward W. Bok, Charles Scribner’s Sons, N.Y., N.Y. 1921