Life, 1899-03-16 · page 2 of 20
Life — March 16, 1899 — page 2: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Analysis This page contains **advertising content for The Cosmopolitan magazine**, not political satire. The top section compares American football to the Spanish **Pelota** (a violent ball game played in Madrid), describing pelota's brutal nature with dramatic language about "casualties" exceeding football's injuries. This serves as promotional copy—using sensationalism to interest readers in Poultney Bigelow's article about the sport. The larger advertisement promotes "The Building of Mohammed's Empire," a historical serial by John Brisben Walker with illustrations by Boston artist Eric Pape. It emphasizes The Cosmopolitan's claim to reach "the largest clientele of intelligent, thoughtful readers" of any periodical worldwide. Both sections are designed to attract readers by highlighting exotic, dramatic content and the magazine's intellectual prestige.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
° = that we We Americans think :...": football a game that is sufficiently savage and exciting, but Poultney Bigelow tells in the March Cosmopolitan of the Spanish Pelota as played in Madrid, where the number of casualties far exceed those of the football field. His account is graphic and spirited, and will give pleasure to the lovers of sport everywhere. “Tt would be a good baseball man who could throw the length of a modern steamship and have the ball travel swiftly enough to cause a rebound the whole length of the ship. These pelota players could not do this with the bare hands. Each wears a leather glove, to the back of which is laced a long basket-work scoop. In this rounded trough, which reaches almost to the ground, the player receives the rebounding ball, and hurls it back against the wall with the force of a sling. The leverage is, as one can readily see, enormous, and the ball strikes with the sound of a musket-ball.”—Extract from Poultney Bigelow’s description. The Building of M\oham- ed's Empire is a very wonderful story, full of ry) interest and rich in dramatic incident. It] has never before appeared in a popular magazine. It is} being told in The Cosmopolitan by John Brisben Walker. | Mr. Eric Pape, the noted Boston artist, has excelled all his | previous work in the extraordinary illustrations which he has furnished for Mohammed and The Building of The Mohammedan Empire. For more than three years The Cosmopolitan has bees able to claim that it has possessed the largest clientele of intelligent, thoughtful readers reached by any periodical f —daily, weekly or monthly—in the world. "THE COSMOPOLITAN, IRVINGTON, NEW YORK. §1.00 A YEAR. ON ALL NEWS-STANDS, 10 CENTS. COPYRIGHT FOR GREAT BRITAIN BY JAMES HENDERSON UNDER THE ACT OF 1801.