Women's Magazines: The First 300 Years

Since Braithwaite has been such a potentate in British women's magazine publishing for decades, it's a shame that his ""history"" isn't more consequential. The book is a loose, lightweight collection of arbitrary anecdotes, idiosyncratically selected. Braithwaite has spent a lifetime in the inner circles and upper echelons of the business, launching such titles as Harpers & Queen and Cosmopolitan. He is in a particularly good position to have written an expert and eagle-eye view of the qualities that have made the women's magazine so popular, so influential and so profitable for so long. Starting with the 1693 launch of Ladies Mercury, it moves briskly through the early years of magazines that combined marriage advice, domestic guidance, moral uplift and the odd bit of Royalty gawking, arriving after a very few pages at 1915 and more familiar types of magazines that reflected the social changes following the Great War. The book rests on armchair affability rather than analysis. Braithwaite's cursory and incomplete appendices of magazine publication facts only seal the disappointing sense of a golden opportunity lost. Braithwaite is slightly more informative when glancing at the launch and marketing of a few, new women's magazines after about 1970. In this era of popular culture studies, when mass media both create and are the stories of our time, it is surprising that an industry insider like Braithwaite doesn't play more to his strengths. (Oct.)