The Lore of Magazines as a Window on the World
CBS Sunday Morning segment featuring Dr. Steven Lomazow
THE LOMAZOW COLLECTION BEGAN IN 1972…
However, Dr. Steven Lomazow’s collecting intensified in 1987 after his acquisition of a major collection from the State Street Bookshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Since this time, great effort has been devoted to acquiring the first issues and/or first volumes of every major American magazine. It has evolved to encompass literary highlights and the best examples from virtually every genre of American popular culture. When the first issue has not been acquired, many titles are represented by illustrative type copies.
The collection is the history of America as reflected in its periodicals. No stone has been left unturned to acquire the finest material. I have attended countless book and ephemera fairs throughout the country and scoured dealers catalogs, websites and online auction sites. While obviously, no collection can include everything, this is clearly the finest accumulation in private hands of important American periodicals. It can never be reproduced. A 1996 catalog and a 2005 addendum are available.
Magazines and the American Experience: Highlights from the Collection of Steven Lomazow, M.D.
The first successful magazine proudly proclaimed itself as The American Magazine in 1744. Magazines in the colonial era became the clarions of revolutionary thought, and the first printed statement of American independence appeared in Thomas Paine’s Pennsylvania Magazine in June 1776.
At the outset of the nineteenth century, magazines documented the origins of the political schism between Federalism and states’ rights that remains a subject of bitter debate to this day.
PRESS:
New Yorker: What are Magazines Good For?
New York Times: Are Magazines Dead? Not at this Exhibition
As publishing expanded, magazines fostered the development of distinct communities of Americans by creating networks of communication, much as the internet does in today’s digital age. We learn from them the history and development of American farmers and tradesmen; women and children; poets, humorists, artisans, reformers and religious groups of every denomination and ethnicity. Magazines and the American Experience is a celebration of this vitally important American medium.
The exhibition is presented in two sections, beginning with a chronological history of American magazines from 1733 to the present. The second is devoted to a broad spectrum of genres which address the areas of popular culture that became a major focus of American magazines in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including American artists and humorists, the ongoing struggle of African Americans to achieve equality, a salute to our national game of baseball, and the development of radio, television, and motion pictures.
The accompanying catalog expands upon the exhibition with a series of essays by leading historians of publishing, enhanced by over four hundred illustrations.
Books by Steven Lomazow
A unique compilation of four highly-illustrated books and one lecture about selected topics in American magazine history using images from the Steven Lomazow Collection of American Periodicals.
Many of the images are unique and have not been previously reproduced. Topics
His collection is widely recognized as the most comprehensive and finest of its kind in private hands. Doctor Lomazow is magazine consultant to the Newseum in Washington, D.C. and many of the items from the collection have been featured in museum exhibitions across the nation.
Aside from his practice of Neurology, he is Adjunct Professor of History at Kean University, President of the New Jersey Society of Medical History, Vice-President of the New Jersey World War II Book Club, Member of the Board of Trustees of the Franklin Roosevelt Library, Member of the National Council of the Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge and an active member of the American Antiquarian Society.
He maintains two blogs at www.magazinehistory.blogspot.com and www.fdrsdeadlysecret.com. His website is www.thegreatamericanmagazine.com.
Steven Lomazow, M.D. is a board-certified neurologist in practice for more than twenty-five years.
He is an assistant professor of neurology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, a member of the New Jersey State Board of Medical Examiners and former president of the Neurological Association of New Jersey. A frequent lecturer on U.S. periodical history, he is a consultant to the Freedom Forum Newseum.
Doctor Lomazow has been an avid collector of American periodicals for over four decades. His collection is widely recognized as the most comprehensive and finest of its kind in private hands. Doctor Lomazow is magazine consultant to the Newseum in Washington, D.C. and many of the items from the collection have been featured in museum exhibitions across the nation. Aside from his practice of Neurology, he is Adjunct Professor of History at Kean University, President of the New Jersey Society of Medical History, Vice-President of the New Jersey World War II Book Club, Member of the Board of Trustees of the Franklin Roosevelt Library, Member of the National Council of the Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge and an active member of the American Antiquarian Society.
He maintains two blogs at www.magazinehistory.blogspot.com and www.fdrsdeadlysecret.com. His website is www.thegreatamericanmagazine.com.
The death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945 sent shock waves around the world. His lifelong physician swore that the president had always been a picture of health.
Later, in 1970, Roosevelt’s cardiologist admitted he had been suffering from uncontrolled hypertension and that his death—from a cerebral hemorrhage—was “a cataclysmic event waiting to happen.” But even this was a carefully constructed deceit, one that began in the 1930s and became acutely necessary as America approached war.
In this great medical detective story and narrative of a presidential cover-up, an exhaustive study of all available reports of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s health, and a comprehensive review of thousands of photographs, an intrepid physician-journalist team reveals that Roosevelt at his death suffered from melanoma, a skin cancer that had spread to his brain and abdomen.
Roosevelt’s condition was not only physically disabling but also could have affected substantially his mental function and his ability to make decisions in the days when the nation was imperiled by World War II.
From Lomazow’s Blog:
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2011 LIFE Magazine at 75
Today is the seventy-fifth anniversary of an important day in magazine history- the first publication of the news-magazine incarnation of LIFE (see my post "The Origin of Life" for history of the prior title).
Remembering Steve Jobs 1955-2011. A Magazine Tribute.
The recent passing of the twenty-first century Thomas Edison has spurred a reprise of my January 2009 post about computer magazines. Job's marketing genius is easily seen in both the magazines and the internet link provided.
Magazine of the Month: Spirit of the Times
This issue contains an unrecorded, perhaps the first ever, detailed description of the rules of the game, baseball. This very scarce sporting journal, later Porter’s Sprit of the Times, is the best source material for early baseball. Early issues cover Cricket fairly frequently. Reports of baseball as we know it begin to trickle in in 1854. By 1857, the quantity of baseball reports outweighed those of cricket.
A New Jersey Neurologist Keeps Three Centuries of American Magazines Alive
“One day I am visited by a collector of ordination sermons; the next, by a collector of 4th of July orations; then comes a collector of geography; another wants religious newspapers; another wants every book printed in New York before 1700. I accommodate myself to all; for I want everything and collect everything, and I have more zeal than the whole of them.” READ MORE…
When Life throws you an issue, then doesn’t, how did Roger Staubach deal with it?
One of the several mini-documentaries that NFL Films has produced this week for the NFL Network and NFL.com surrounding the storylines of the John F. Kennedy assassination 50 years ago surrounds a media angle that isn’t all that well known. READ MORE…