Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century

Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century. By Richard Ohmann. New York: Verso, 1996.

Richard Ohmann's Selling Culture argues persuasively that a national mass culture first emerged with the 1890s mass-circulation magazines, those magazines that turned a profit on advertising and that grew out of a new network of social relations brought about by the incorporation of product, labor, and cultural production. The 1890s initiation of mass culture occupies a central place in Ohmann's analysis, both as he defines the "mass" of his subject and as he embarks on a complex explanation to his question, "Why then?" The beginning chapters place the needs of capitalists and the desires of audiences at the forefront of analysis. Chapter 1, "The Experience," imagines the reading practices of an imaginary family: the white, professional middleclass "Johnsons," who subscribe to Munsey's for the subjects that shape conversations at home and in the office. The Johnsons read for tips on dress and manners; they savor images of the "new" professional family life where the purchase of "readymade" products supplants the once celebrated self-sufficiency of home production, and where work has been replaced by exercise and urbanized free-time activities like bicycling. Less consciously, they pursue their reading pleasures for direction in the new class privilege, a privilege reinforced through a display of racial exclusiveness (dark and black types were few in number and inhabited the corners of massmagazine culture).

In short, Ohmann's imaginary case study illuminates a network of relations between audience and magazine whereby reading served to mediate and order an understanding of a quickly changing world. The major change of this particular cultural world, as Ohmann argues with abundant evidence in chapter 2, "The Origins of Mass Culture," is that unlike any magazine that would have appeared ten years before, Munsey's was affordable and circulated simultaneously to hundreds of thousands of readers (at least three hundred thousand) to constitute the "mass" of Ohmann's magazine sampling. (According to Frank Munsey himself, Munsey's meteoric rise was launched from 1894's idle regional numbers of twenty thousand or so to over five hundred thousand in 1896.) Munsey's surged into national circulation at a moment that has been termed "the magazine revolution" when a nearly simultaneous explosion of circulation figures...