The Westerner, The Truth About the West, October 1910
Earlington, WA: The Westerner Company, 1910.
8.5 x 11.5 inches, 40 pp, illustrated wrappers. Halftone illustrations throughout. Small ownership label on front cover, two leaves with creasing and pale stains; very good.
In a 1911 advertising trade publication, The Westerner’s founder and editor, Edgar Lloyd Hampton (1872-1951), boasted that his monthly magazine had 80,000 paid subscribers in the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and California, and sold an additional 7,000 copies on the newsstands. He attributed his success to a dedicated focus on topics of regional interest. This issue carries articles on a livestock exhibition in Portland, the attractions of land in British Columbia, and the growing seaport of Florence, Oregon, as well as briefer congratulatory notices of happenings in Los Angeles (San Pedro Harbor nearly completed), Walla Walla (old fort grounds are being converted to a plum orchard), and other cities. Given the relative scarcity of surviving copies of The Westerner, we suspect Hampton’s circulation numbers were inflated. But advertisers seem to have been convinced, as the magazine contains a profusion of ads—for orchard lands, dairy farms, investment opportunities, hotels, automobiles, farming implements, books, patent medicines, correspondence courses, and more. The Westerner ceased publication in 1915, when Hampton took his promotional talents to Southern California.
Item #19873
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