Life, 1909-07-01 · page 42 of 44
Life — July 1, 1909 — page 42: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page reproduces an unsolicited favorable review of *Life* magazine from the *Montpelier, Vermont Journal*. The editors use it to demonstrate authentic praise versus insincere "puffs." The Vermont editor praises *Life* for providing humor and satire as a necessary counterbalance to serious newspaper content—suicides, tragedies, tariff debates, and Roosevelt's hunting exploits. *Life* is commended for using simple black-and-white illustration and witty writing to brighten gloomy times, without competing with Sunday supplements' color splash. The accompanying cupid illustration is decorative. The editors emphasize the Vermont piece's genuineness: the writer felt compelled to praise *Life* unprompted, expressed himself naturally, and avoided the self-aggrandizing overreach typical of paid endorsements. Essentially, this is *Life* magazine celebrating its own role as satirical relief in early-20th-century American journalism.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Thank You! You can almost always trust the man from Vermont to do the right thing. Here’s an instance. We reproduce from the Montpelier, Ver- mont Journal a little unsolicited tribute to LIFE. We wanted you to see just what it looked like, so we photographed it directly from the editoriai page of the paper, and this re- The moment you read it, you see at once that it is a genuine human document. The man who wrote it didn’t have to do it. Nobody asked him to. He just felt that way, and he expressed himself, simply and naturally, without any affectation. You can tell a ‘puff’’ notice every time. The writer back of it is sure to give him- self away. He always overreaches himself production is a facsimile of the original. Why is it so interesting? Well, for one thing, because it is true. But that isn’t all. It is really interesting because it has a personality back of it. As for next week's LIFE, it isa regular, ecial. We are doing this for & 2, just to show you that we know is one thing in, or rather on it, er, that we want to mention in advance. ‘That is the colored cover by Mr. Phillips. It is called “Arms and the Man.” It's a great cover, When you have it, when it has sunk into your y it thing about {t—a wonderful sense of love’ and. comradeship, of hope and despair. a loneliness and yet a satiety— all this and many more things, are ex- pressed in that picture. When you see it, study it carefully, and see if it doesn’t reveal some hidden thing to you, an indefloable something that never before has been expressed to you in just that way. —tries too hard. The man from Vermont didn’t make that mistake. He didn’t want to. He felt that way about LIFE, he had a generous, kindly impulse to say so, and he obeyed that impulse. “LIFE” AND ITS MISSION. Along with all the serlousness of life we all need a tonic in the shape of something bright, something humorous, something witty, something absurd, some nonsense, anything that will pinch a smile in the midst of it all, The newspapers are filled with suicides, tragedies, Chinese puzzles like the tariff question, that are not always funny, in- vestigations of this and that, how long the Wrights stayed in the air the last time, serious recapitulations of the numbei of species of ani- mals Roosevelt now has in his game bag, etc., etc. The magazines are sounding alarm in this direction and that when they ought many times to be disseminating fiction that is worth reading. They are all getting grouchy to a greater cr less extent with occasional rifts in the clouds of gloom for a bright spark of nonsense. There is one paper that comes to this desk every week that is wel- come because it is always bright and fresh. It is scattering its sun- shine along a gloomy way and doing it well. That paper is Lite. It catches the spirit of the times in its pen sketches, cartoons and writing and does not compete with some others of its kind and the Sunday newspaper supplements to see how many colors of ink can be splashed ona page. Common black and white are its material ingredients, but it has the redeeming feature of being bright in writings and sketches, It is supposed to be funny and it is. This is free advertising with no material return in it, but a paper that is doing what Life is should re. ceive a commending word now and then that does not spring from its own advertising department. It is conspicuons in its class, that is all —From the Montpelier, Vermont Journal. comicbooks.com