The Passing Scene: Farewell to the Satevepost

I have not been a regular reader of the Saturday Evening Post since I was a boy in the Twenties, but somehow I had come to consider it with its Norman Rockwell covers as a perdurable American institution, immune to depressions, wars and even inflation. After all, it was founded in 1728 by Benjamin Franklin. Last year I even took out a reduced-rate subscription for my mother. Several copies arrived before the announcement followed that we were purged from the list of subscribers apparently in an effort by the publisher to achieve classier readers. Even this plebeian rejection was not enough, for I noticed a few months later that the Post would shortly discontinue publication.

Some time after this announcement, while I was waiting for a plane for Cleveland at Boston’s Logan Airport on a drizzly morning, I saw on the newsstand what I took to be the last Post. Gone were those “cute” Rockwell covers. This ultimate cover, by two illustrators I never heard of, showed Grove Press’ long-toothed Barney Ross emerging from under a manhole-cover to display a selection of his firm’s wares subtitled: “dirty books for Fun and Profit.” Sandwiched in between My Secret Life and the Henry Millers, I noticed hard-cover copies of Red Star over China and Kim Philby’s My Silent War.

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Francis Russell

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I have not been a regular reader of the Saturday Evening Post since I was a boy in the Twenties, but somehow I had come to consider it with its Norman Rockwell covers as a perdurable American institution, immune to depressions, wars and even inflation. After all, it was founded in 1728 by Benjamin Franklin. Last year I even took out a reduced-rate subscription for my mother. Several copies arrived before the announcement followed that we were purged from the list of subscribers apparently in an effort by the publisher to achieve classier readers. Even this plebeian rejection was not enough, for I noticed a few months later that the Post would shortly discontinue publication.

Some time after this announcement, while I was waiting for a plane for Cleveland at Boston’s Logan Airport on a drizzly morning, I saw on the newsstand what I took to be the last Post. Gone were those “cute” Rockwell covers. This ultimate cover, by two illustrators I never heard of, showed Grove Press’ long-toothed Barney Ross emerging from under a manhole-cover to display a selection of his firm’s wares subtitled: “dirty books for Fun and Profit.” Sandwiched in between My Secret Life and the Henry Millers, I noticed hard-cover copies of Red Star over China and Kim Philby’s My Silent War.