Magazine

For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy – until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Here is a tribute to all that magazines were, from their origins in London and on Ben Franklin’s press; through their boom – enabled by new technologies – as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-supported conglomerates; and finally to their fall at the hands of the internet.

Part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons, a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.