American Heritage suspends publication

A venerable U.S. history magazine that was one of the few magazines that appeared originally in hardcovers (the other was Horizon), American Heritage -- owned by Forbes Inc., publishers of Forbes magazine -- has been suspended. According to a story in the New York Times, the magazine has been for sale since January and the June-July issue is "on hold" pending some resolution. American Heritage's website is being maintained for now.

The closest Canadian equivalent to American Heritage is The Beaver: Canada's National History Magazine, although that title is published by a not-for-profit foundation.

Current circulation is 350,000, the highest it has ever been. The original editor of the magazine was the famous Civil War historian Bruce Catton who wrote in the inaugural issue in December 1954 that “the faith that moves us is, quite simply, the belief that our heritage is best understood by a study of the things that the ordinary folk of America have done and thought and dreamed since first they began to live here.”

Originally, the magazine's founders refused to take advertising (finding a “basic incompatibility between the tones of the voice of history and of advertising”) — and instead charged a yearly subscription of $10, a figure so steep at the time that readers were allowed to pay it in installments. In its early years, it was published clothbound. It stayed hardback until 1980. In the mid-90s it was redesigned and repositioned to appeal to younger, boomer readers.

The magazine became a treasured collector's item and many back issues are still available in used book stores and online used book sites.

Editor Richard F. Snow said the magazine only began taking advertising reluctantly, in 1982. “We all felt very bad about taking advertising,” Mr. Snow recalled. “But it had the odd effect of making us feel we were in touch with the world. There was a sense of a living connection to a process that was actually sort of fun — or at least it was fun while we were getting ads.”

The NYT article said Snow gets to keep his Royal manual typewriter as part of his severance.

“That was the typewriter I was assigned in 1970, and it will follow me to the grave,” he said, and he added: “I wish this were more a sign of granitic stability, but in fact it’s a sign of my computer incompetence. I use it just to type labels, but it works beautifully. Every year someone comes in and cleans it. I don’t think he’s paid by Forbes. He’s some spectral presence who just turns up.”