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America's first humor magazine...
America's first humor magazine...
Item # 613457
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October 30, 1852
THE CARPET-BAG, Boston, Oct. 30, 1852 Thanks to "seacoastnh.com" for the following: "The nation's first humor magazine was "The Carpet Bag, edited by Benjamin Shillaber, is today just a footnote in the expanding history of American comedy. Copies are hard to come by, but hard to miss. The elaborately illustrated masthead shows a human hand grasping the leather handle of a fabric-covered bag, the all-purpose 19th century equivalent of a backpack. Today this cheap, floppy, flat-bottomed bit of luggage carries a negative connotation; it will be forever associated with the "carpetbaggers" who hurried to exploit the South after the Civil War. But to Shillaber's earlier audience, a carpetbag was simply a place to keep all sorts of household stuff. His new publication, he explained, was to be the literary equivalent -- stuffed to bursting with bits of prose and poetry that were just too precious to throw away.
Published weekly in Boston "for the amusement of the reader", The Carpet Bag survived only two years and earned only a few hundred subscribers. But when it appeared in Boston in 1851 it was -- by design -- the biggest joke in town."
The front page has a negro-themed illustration, and another captioned: "Spirituous Manifestations". Another print inside.
Category: Pre-Civil War
No Longer Available
