Captains of Industry (ep16) Cyrus Curtis

Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis (June 18, 1850 – June 7, 1933) was an American publisher of magazines and newspapers, including the Ladies' Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post.Show more

Early life and education
Curtis was born in Portland, Maine. He was forced to leave high school after his first year to start working after his family lost their home in the Great Fire of Portland.

Career
Curtis held a variety of newspaper and advertising jobs in Portland and Boston before starting his first publication, a weekly called the People's Ledger, in Boston in 1872.

In 1876, he moved to Philadelphia, then a major publishing center, to reduce his printing costs.

Curtis's first wife was Louisa Knapp. In 1883, Knapp contributed a one-page supplement to the Tribune and Farmer, a magazine published by Curtis. The following year, the supplement was expanded as an independent publication with Louisa as the editor. Its original name was The Ladies Home Journal and Practical Housekeeper, but Knapp dropped the last three words in 1886, and it became Ladies Home Journal. The Ladies' Home Journal rapidly became the leading magazine of its type, reaching a circulation of one million subscriptions within ten years. It was the first American magazine to do so.

Louisa Knapp continued as editor until 1889 when she was succeeded by Edward William Bok. Several years later Bok married Mary Louise Curtis in 1896, becoming the Curtises' son-in-law. Bok retired from the magazine in 1919, but the changes he made had vastly increased circulation. Bok introduced business practices such as: low subscription rates, inclusion of advertising to off-set costs, and reliance on popular content. This operating structure was adopted by men's magazines such as McClure's and Munsey's roughly a decade after it had become the standard practice of American women's magazines. Scholars argue that women's magazines, like the Ladies' Home Journal, pioneered these strategies "magazine revolution".

Curtis founded the Curtis Publishing Company in 1891; it would eventually publish Ladies' Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, Holiday, and others. A separate company founded by Curtis, Curtis-Martin Newspapers, controlled several newspapers, including for a time the Philadelphia Public Ledger, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the New York Evening Post. Management mistakes at the newspapers led to poor financial returns, and eventually, they were sold.

While Curtis was alive, his businesses, excepting the newspapers, were successful. Ladies Home Journal was for decades the most widely circulating women's magazine in the U.S., and The Saturday Evening Post enjoyed the highest circulation of any weekly magazine in the world. In 1929, the Post and the Journal together ran fully forty percent of all US magazine advertising. One source lists Curtis as the 51st richest person ever, with a fortune of $43.2 billion adjusted for inflation (to 2008 dollars), which according to this source made him richer than J. P. Morgan.