Earlier this month, I shared with you a bunch of typewriters you could have bought in 1893. So let’s say you had bought one of them … what then?

Well, if you were a writer, surely you didn’t expect to publish your stories without a little editorial supervision. That’s where Dr. Titus M. Coan’s New York Bureau of Revision came in. His advertisement in the January 1893 issue of The Cosmopolitan promised that he’d provide “unbiased criticism of prose and verse.”

Would love to know exactly which “leading authors” endorsed his services, though.

And at the other end of the publishing food chain, readers need help, too. That’s what the Holloway Reading Stand and Dictionary Holder were all about.

Because reading a book while letting it rest in one’s lap is so old-fashioned!

Old friends visited us from New York over the long weekend, and there was much baking and grilling and blowing stuff up real good, all activities that are mandatory when celebrating the 4th of July.

Last night, we somehow got around to discussing the evolution of the QWERTY keyboard, and then we moved on to praising the IBM Selectric typewriter, much beloved by those of us lucky enough to have owned one during the pre-computer past. Which made me remember that one of the old magazines I own (and in case you don’t happen to know, I love reading newspapers and magazines that are a century or more old) contains multiple ads for typewriters, which were then not so many decades old, at least commercially.

So here is what you could have ordered from the back pages of the January 1893 issue of The Cosmopolitan … if you were able to make up your mind when faced with the wildly varying styles. (more…)

It’s said that the two things you should never see being made are sausages and the law, but to that list you should add magazines. It can be an ugly process. And yet the editors of The Cosmopolitan, one of the leading general-interest magazines in the country, decided to share their secrets with a lengthy article in the January issue.

That’s the January 1893 issue, as you can see by my somewhat tattered copy.

In an article titled “The Making of an Illustrated Magazine,” readers are taken through the entire publishing process, from start-up costs, to the difficulties of obtaining advertising, to that stack of unsolicited manuscripts that has existed at every magazine since the first issue of the first magazine was carved into stone tablets.

Here are a few choice excerpts from that 14-page article, which show that perhaps time really hasn’t changed things that much after all. (more…)