According to George H. Douglas, "smart magazines were written and edited for the leisured classes (although not necessarily the very rich)—for sophisticated urbanites, the kind of person who was well traveled, well read, well acquainted; for people who wanted to be entertained, but on an exalted plane." These magazines, he added, were "general magazines intended for the entertainment of cultural elites … rooted in … contrivances of humor, of gaiety, of urbanity, of high style and fashion. The rich, it seemed, were not usually interested in 'uplift,' in the birth pangs of reform and good works; as often as not they enjoyed the demimonde, even low life; they wanted to hear about the lives of actors, poets, of theatre people, pugilists, polo players. They loved gossip and scandal."
Major changes in the printing process during the 1880s and 1890s made faster typesetting and printing possible, allowing for more publications of higher quality. After the halftone process, chromolithography, and rotogravure printing were invented, magazines took on a new glossy format, filled with full-page color illustrations and advertisements. The vast changes in advertising, which metamorphosed from simple classified-type ads to colorful images and slogans thought out by prestigious firms, contributed to the evolution of a whole new kind of magazine, leading to an era which Douglas calls "a renaissance or high-water mark of theAmerican magazine with many new giants entering the field, and many older ones becoming bigger and more affluent than they would have dreamed possible before … By the 1890s magazines had become big business."
Into a field that included the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home Journal, and Harper's Monthly entered the first of these smart magazines, aptly called The Smart Set and subtitled "A Magazine of Cleverness." A huge success during the first decade of the twentieth century, this literary and artistic monthly catering to cosmopolitan café society became a model periodical, featuring the writing of such brilliant young literary bucks as H.
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