Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner

From 1865 the Frank Leslie publishing house issued Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner, a weekly illustrated story paper made for the family hearth. Where Leslie's flagship Illustrated Newspaper chased the war and the headline, the Chimney Corner sold fiction: serialized romances and adventures, domestic tales, poems, and household miscellany, printed on cheap paper in large folio sheets and carried by the woodcut. Each number opened on an engraved illustration — a dramatic scene lifted from the week's leading serial, cut for the press by the same corps of engravers who built Leslie's picture-paper empire. Frank Leslie had learned illustration in London and made his American name on volume and speed: many titles, many woodcuts, a new number every week for a mass audience. The Chimney Corner was his bid for the fireside reader, the popular fiction weekly that ran alongside the news. The scans here are public-domain issues from 1865, drawn from the Villanova University Digital Library and digitally restored at comicbooks.com — the illustrated serial fiction, a generation before the comic book, that taught a mass readership to expect a picture with its story.