There are two kinds of men who never amount to much," Cyrus Curtis liked to say, "those who cannot do what they are told and those who can do nothing else."
Cyrus Curtis (June 18, 1850 – June 7, 1933) was an American, a well-accomplished magazine and newspaper publisher. Well known as the founder of Curtis Publishing Company, Cyrus H.K. Curtis established a journalistic empire in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He started his career in magazine publishing at the age of 15, when he became founder of Young America. His first periodical, The People's Ledger was first published in Boston in 1872. Later, in Philadelphia, he started another periodical called Tribune and Farmer. After moving to Boston and then Philadelphia, Curtis purchased the Saturday Evening Post in 1897 and founded the Curtis Publishing Company. He played a significant role in the emergence of modern magazine publishing. Some of the most well-known American writers, such as Jack London and Wilson Rawls had articles published in his The Saturday Evening Post magazine.
Cyrus Curtis (June 18, 1850 – June 7, 1933) was an American, a well-accomplished magazine and newspaper publisher. Well known as the founder of Curtis Publishing Company, Cyrus H.K. Curtis established a journalistic empire in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He started his career in magazine publishing at the age of 15, when he became founder of Young America. His first periodical, The People's Ledger was first published in Boston in 1872. Later, in Philadelphia, he started another periodical called Tribune and Farmer. After moving to Boston and then Philadelphia, Curtis purchased the Saturday Evening Post in 1897 and founded the Curtis Publishing Company. He played a significant role in the emergence of modern magazine publishing. Some of the most well-known American writers, such as Jack London and Wilson Rawls had articles published in his The Saturday Evening Post magazine.
Soon after the purchase of the Saturday Evening Post, Curtis and his wife, Louisa Knapp, founded the Ladies’ Home Journal.
Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis was born in Portland, Maine on June 18, 1850. The son of Cyrus Libby Curtis, he also was named after Hermann Kotzschmar, an exceptional choral composer.He grew up modestly, at best. "My father and mother had all they could do to keep the wheels going around without letting the neighbors know there was no oil with which to lubricate them," he later admitted. So, it came as no surprise, then, that his mother refused to underwrite his yen for Fourth of July fireworks when he was 12 years. With 3 cents in his pocket, Curtis bought the last three papers from the neighborhood newsboy and quickly turned a 9-cent profit. He bought his fireworks. More importantly, the next morning, he signed up for a paper route of his own.
Curtis became a newsboy for the Courier and began to buy the papers and sell them for a little profit. This business did extremely well during the Civil War, when Curtis would sell these papers to soldiers around his town. Curtis continued to sell the Courier until he was offered a job at the Portland Press and then the Portland Argus. Then on April 5, 1865, at the age of 15, Curtis left his position at the Portland Argus.He started his own newspaper called Young American. Not only did Curtis publish this newspaper, but he also wrote the whole newspaper.
He was forced to leave high school after his first year when in 1866 his family lost their home in the Great Fire of Portland.
Within a year, he saved enough to buy a small printing press and began to publish and sell his own newspaper, which did quite well until fire consumed his operation in 1866. For the next several years, he worked as clerk and salesman in Boston but could not shake the residue of ink in his veins, and in 1869 returned to selling newspaper advertising. Three years later, with barely enough capital to get started, he had his own paper again.
Curtis continued to write, print, and publish the Young American in his Portland based plant until 1866, when a fire struck his plant and destroyed it. After the fire in Portland, Curtis was left to make a major decision: to stay and rebuild or to change locations and try again.
Curtis decided to move to Boston three years after the fire that destroyed his Portland plant. Curtis chose to build another publishing plant in Boston and started a weekly business magazine, People’s Ledger, in 1872. However, another fire would hit Curtis’s publishing plant in 1872, resulting in Curtis once again losing everything that he owned. Faced with the decision of staying in Boston or moving, Curtis decided to move to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1876.
Curtis decided to move to Boston three years after the fire that destroyed his Portland plant. Curtis chose to build another publishing plant in Boston and started a weekly business magazine, People’s Ledger, in 1872. However, another fire would hit Curtis’s publishing plant in 1872, resulting in Curtis once again losing everything that he owned. Faced with the decision of staying in Boston or moving, Curtis decided to move to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1876.
From the time of Franklin into the mid-1800s, Philadelphia had been the publishing center of Britain’s North American colonies and then the United States. Here, in the decades before the Civil War, it was home to the America best-selling magazines for women and men: Godey’s Lady’s Book and Grahams. When Curtis moved to the city, it had lost that lead to New York, but was still thriving. There, in 1879, Curtis and a partner founded the Tribune and Farmer, a new publication primarily devoted to agriculture. To boost the paper’s circulation, Curtis inserted a one-page supplement he thought would appeal to women. Curtis’s wife, Louise Knapp, hated it, deeming it a laughable attempt by men to come up with useful advice for homemakers. So Curtis challenged her to run it herself.
Together they made publishing history. Louise immediately replaced the clipped materials he had been running with her own originals. Within a few months, her column became a page, and soon the page evolved into its own supplement under her editorship. The supplement proved so successful that Curtis sold his interest in Tribune and Farmer. His new Ladies' Home Journal hit the streets in December 1883. Circulation jumped to 25,000 within a year, and it became the first magazine to reach a million subscribers by 1900. By the time Curtis died in 1933, circulation had reached more than 2.5 million. Despite its title, the Journal also appealed to male readers; during World War I, it was the third most popular magazine among American servicemen overseas.
On the back of the Journal, Curtis built an empire. In 1891, he founded Curtis Publishing. Seven years later, he bought the foundering Saturday Evening Post, the successor of the Pennsylvania Gazette begun in 1728 and published by Benjamin Franklin, for a mere $1,000, and turned the bland weekly, on the brink of collapse, into a popular periodical with high quality writing and illustrations. Circulation reached one million in less than a decade, and eventually jumped to nearly three million. In 1911, he added the old farm magazine, Country Gentleman, to his stable, and turned it into the second most popular agricultural magazine in the country.
A successful Business Empire
Curtis founded the Curtis Publishing Company in 1891; it would eventually publish Ladies' Home Journal, the Saturday Evening Post, Holiday, and others. A separate company founded by Curtis, Curtis-Martin Newspapers, controlled several newspapers, including for a time the Philadelphia Public Ledger, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the New York Evening Post.
In 1897 the Saturday Evening Post was a magazine on the decline in popularity; however, Curtis saw some potential in the magazine and decided to purchase the Saturday Evening Post. While many people, including family and friends, advised against the purchase, Curtis didn’t listen and bought the Saturday Evening Post for $1,000. Eventually, after investing much of his own money, Curtis was able to hire George Horace Lorimer as chief editor of the Saturday Evening Post in 1898. After the hiring of Lorimer, the perseverance of Curtis allowed the Saturday Evening Post to once again become one of the most popular and venerated magazines in the United States. By 1962, the Saturday Evening Post had a peak number of copies in circulation (6,652,000). Then, in 1911, Curtis decided that he wanted to take on another challenge: the Country Gentleman. Approaching this challenge like the previous, Curtis worked very hard and within a couple of years the Country Gentleman was also a huge success.
Curtis’s success in magazine publishing led him to pursue another area of publishing: newspapers. Curtis started out by purchasing the Philadelphia Public Ledger in 1913, then the Philadelphia Press and Philadelphia North America in 1920, which he combined and made the Public Ledger. Curtis continued in the newspaper publishing business with the purchases of the New York Evening Post in 1923 and the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1930.
Curtis built the People’s Ledger, a weekly, around the reprint of long narratives—either fiction or nonfiction—that had been popular decades before. The Ledger did well for six years, until rising printing costs ate up his profits. His papers were not as successful as his magazines; he eventually had to sell three of them. Curtis moved to Philadelphia.Unfortunately, Curtis didn’t see the success in the newspaper publishing field that he saw in magazine publishing. Curtis was forced to sell all of his papers.
Curtis built the People’s Ledger, a weekly, around the reprint of long narratives—either fiction or nonfiction—that had been popular decades before. The Ledger did well for six years, until rising printing costs ate up his profits. His papers were not as successful as his magazines; he eventually had to sell three of them. Curtis moved to Philadelphia.Unfortunately, Curtis didn’t see the success in the newspaper publishing field that he saw in magazine publishing. Curtis was forced to sell all of his papers.
While Curtis was alive, his businesses were extremely successful. The Ladies Home Journal was for decades the most widely circulating women's magazine in the US, and The Saturday Evening Post enjoyed the highest circulation of any weekly magazine in the world. In 1929, the Post and the Journal together ran fully forty percent of all US magazine advertising.
The magazines, greatly influenced American culture. The Ladies' Home Journal, a women's supplement to the Tribune and Farmer, was edited by his wife, Louisa Knapp, until she was replaced by Edward William Bok.
Curtis’s formula for success was both old and new. Like Godey’s and Grahams before him, he published for the growing American middle class and assembled a team of trusted editors, including his own wife and his son-in-law Edward Bok. "I don’t edit magazines," Curtis announced, "I edit editors." Paying top-dollar for top writers and illustrators, he attracted marquee names. Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Theodore Roosevelt, markerOwen Wister, Stephen Crane, and Bret Harte were all featured in his pages. Using new printing technologies, Curtis became the first magazine publisher to rely on color illustrations, and the first to change covers every month; the Post’s long relationship with artist Norman Rockwell led to some of the most instantly recognizable covers in magazine history.
Curtis also altered the nature of advertising and market research, utilizing both in a large scale and unprecedented ways. The first major magazine publisher to reduce subscription prices to below the cost of production, Curtis relied on the revenue from advertising for safe and reliable goods and services that would appeal to the growing millions of national, middle-class consumers. Unwilling to compromise the quality of his magazines, he refused to publish ads for patent medical products, cosmetics, cigarettes, and financial schemes that he believed targeted the inheritances of women.
In the early 1900s, Curtis also made pioneering use of market research. In 1911, he established the Division of Commercial Research, managed by Charles Coolidge Parlin, who soon became known as the founder of market research. Under Parlin’s direction, Curtis Publishing researched nationwide markets, subscriber demographics, product distribution, and competing magazines to increase the success of their advertisers’ products, and thus boost Curtis's revenue from advertising and magazine subscriptions by enhancing its magazines’ credibility.
In the early twentieth century, the Curtis Publishing Company became one of the most influential publishing houses in the United States. One of the most popular magazines in American history, the Saturday Evening Post soared from a circulation of one million copies a week in 1909 to seven million in 1961.
To distribute the magazine, Curtis developed a multi-layered field organization and used thousands of adults and "boy salesmen" to deliver copies of his magazines to every town and village in the United States on Wednesday of each week. In the 1940s, the company opened this distribution service to other publishers, including Bantam Books, which launched with twenty titles in December 1945, and Wonder Books, which came to Curtis in 1949.
Curtis's magazines prospered, as did Curtis himself. At the time of his death, he was reputed to control one of the five largest fortunes in America. A generous philanthropist, he spread his wealth throughout the Philadelphia region, making significant contributions to regional universities, medical schools, and hospitals, the Franklin Institute, the Philadelphia Opera, and the famed Curtis Institute of Music, founded in 1924 by his daughter, Mary Louise Curtis Bok.
The arrival of television after World War II would bring about the collapse of general interest periodicals like the Post and the Journal. In March 1962, Curtis Publishing lost money for the first time since its incorporation more than seventy years before. Curtis Publishing sold The Ladies' Home Journal and The American Home in 1968 and the Saturday Evening Post, the last of its magazines, in 1982.
Cyrus Curtis is one of Americans richest ever. Owing to his love of nature, Curtis established the Curtis Arboretum. The garden contains more than 300 trees of 56 varieties. He was known for his philanthropy to hospitals, museums, universities, and schools. It was Curtis who donated the Kotzschmar Memorial Organ to the city of Portland. He donated $2 million to the Franklin Institute, for example; $1.25 million to the Drexel Institute of Technology for the construction of Curtis Hall; and $1 million to the University of Pennsylvania. He also purchased a pipe organ manufactured by the Austin Organ Company that had been displayed at the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition of 1926 and donated it to the University of Pennsylvania.
It was incorporated into Irvine Auditorium when the building was constructed and is known to this day as the Curtis Organ, one of the largest pipe organs in the world. (The largest is said to reside in Philadelphia's John Wanamaker Building, only twenty blocks east of Irvine Auditorium.) Curtis donated pipe organs to many institutions in Philadelphia and on the day of his funeral, all of those organs were played in his honor.The Curtis Memorial Organ, donated by his daughter, Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist, occupies the loft of Maine's Portland City Hall Auditorium in memory of her father. In Thomaston, Maine, he funded the 1927-29 recreation of Montpelier, the demolished 1795 mansion of Revolutionary War general Henry Knox.
Curtis built Lyndon, a Renaissance revival estate in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, with landscaping designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Two of Curtis's yachts, built 1907 and 1920, were named Lyndonia.
Cyrus Curtis was among the first ten inductees in the American Advertising Federation's Advertising Hall of Fame (1999).
Curtis was a major organizer and backer of the Philadelphia Orchestra, founded in 1900. In its early years, he paid off its debts anonymously. Curtis's daughter, Mary Louise Curtis Bok, founded Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music in 1924 and dedicated it to her father.
Curtis was more than an occasional sailor, however, noting in a 1922 New York Times interview, "Yachting is not a hobby with me. It is a necessity. I spend half my time on this ship," and further noting that most of his meetings with staff or board members were held in the second Lyndonia's dining room. Curtis had three large yachts built at Charles L. Seabury Co.: the 115-foot Machigonne in 1904; the 163-foot Lyndonia in 1907; and the 228-foot Lyndonia in 1920. Curtis was a founding member of the Camden Yacht Club in Camden, Maine, and its Commodore from 1909 to 1933, later donating the club's facilities to the town.
En route to building one of the nation's most innovative periodical empires, Curtis clearly found the happy medium. Indeed, his Curtis Publishing Company was so savvy in its early twentieth century heyday that its two leading magazines—The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal—raked in some forty cents of every dollar spent on magazine advertising in the country. These magazines were not just commercial successes, either; they published some of the most important writers of the times and changed the way the magazine business operated. When he died, in 1933, Curtis was considered not just a giant in his industry but a true icon of American business.
The advertising and market research innovations pioneered by Curtis Publishing were soon embraced by magazines across the country. By presenting readers with advice on how to spend their money and their time, Curtis’s Ladies' Home Journal, Country Gentleman, and the Saturday Evening Post helped to create the modern American consumer.
Lyndon, his country estate in Wyncote, with its magnificent gardens, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. To honor her father, his daughter turned it into an arboretum after his death.
Cyrus Curtis died on June 7, 1933, at his home in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. He is survived by his daughter, Mary Louise Bok Zimbalist.
Soon after his death, most of the buildings on Curtis's estate were demolished, and his daughter founded the Curtis Hall Arboretum on the site. After the Curtis Publishing Company moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1982, the company's former headquarters on Independence Square in downtown Philadelphia became the Curtis Center, home to a conference center, offices, a health club, retail shops, and restaurants.
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