The field was altogether different when Edward Bok entered it in 1889.  It was not only wide open, but fairly crying out to be filled.  The day of Godey’s Lady’s Book had passed; Peterson’s Magazine was breathing its last; and the home or women’s magazines that had attempted to take their place were sorry affairs.  It was this consciousness of a void ready to be filled that made the Philadelphia experiment so attractive to the embryo editor.  He looked over the field and reasoned that if such magazines as did exist could be fairly successful, if women were ready to buy such, how much greater response would there be to a magazine of higher standards, of larger initiative—­a magazine that would be an authoritative clearing-house for all the problems confronting women in the home, that brought itself closely into contact with those problems and tried to solve them in an entertaining and efficient way; and yet a magazine of uplift and inspiration:  a magazine, in other words, that would give light and leading in the woman’s world.

The method of editorial expression in the magazines of 1889 was also distinctly vague and prohibitively impersonal.  The public knew the name of scarcely a single editor of a magazine; there was no personality that stood out in the mind:  the accepted editorial expression was the indefinite “we”; no one ventured to use the first person singular and talk intimately to the reader.  Edward Bok’s biographical reading had taught him that the American public loved a personality; that it was always ready to recognize and follow a leader, provided, of course, that the qualities of leadership were demonstrated.  He felt the time had come—­the reference here and elsewhere is always to the realm of popular magazine literature appealing to a very wide audience—­for the editor of some magazine to project his personality through the printed page and to convince the public that he was not an oracle removed from the people, but a real human being who could talk and not merely write on paper.

He saw, too, that the average popular magazine of 1889 failed of large success because it wrote down to the public—­a grievous mistake that so many editors have made and still make.  No one wants to be told, either directly or indirectly, that he knows less than he does, or even that he knows as little as he does; every one is benefited by the opposite implication, and the public will always follow the leader who comprehends this bit of psychology.  There is always a happy medium between shooting over the public’s head and shooting too far under it.  And it is because of the latter aim that we find the modern popular magazine the worthless thing that, in so many instances, it is to-day.

It is the rare editor who rightly gauges his public psychology.  Perhaps that is why, in the enormous growth of the modern magazine, there have been produced so few successful editors.  The average editor is obsessed with the idea of “giving the public what it wants,” whereas, in fact, the public, while it knows what it wants when it sees it, cannot clearly express its wants, and never wants the thing that it does ask for, although it thinks it does at the time.  But woe to the editor and his periodical if he heeds that siren voice!