WORD | Puck Magazine

I find myself having conversations about old media versus new media on almost a daily basis now; as someone who has worked, and continues to work, in both mediums it's endlessly fascinating to me. Now more than ever I see the relationship between old and new to be less competitive and more symbiotic. I'm a big fan of old media myself, and when I say old media, I mean OLD media—images and references from old issues of defunct magazines like Collier's, LOOK and LIFE have been featured on this blog countless times and I've just recently discovered another one to add to that list: Puck Magazine. Puck is considered to be America's first successful humor magazine, it ran its premier issue in 1871 out of St. Louis (before moving to New York) and continued to publish weekly issues for over 40 years. The title is derived from the word puckish, meaning childishly mischievous—the same word that led Shakespeare to appropriately name the character Puck of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The illustrated covers were often politically driven and are so much fun to look through, with plenty of tomboy style fodder peppered in through the decades. Puck closed its doors in 1918, just two years after the William Randolph Hearst Company purchased it, but its spirit is still alive (if perhaps only in new media), almost a century later.