The Smart Set of Data
by Craig J. Saper

Founded in 1900 by William d’Alton Mann, The Smart Set became important when H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan edited the magazine (1914 -1923) adding a new subtitle, A Magazine of Cleverness. They soon established the magazine’s legacy in a lineage now including The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. The magazine’s impact and importance included publishing one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first stories in 1919. As one can see from the graph of the magazine’s circulation during those years, it had a relatively modest reach.

Smart Set circulation, 1923-1930

Under their leadership the magazine struggled to make money, and as one can see from the circulation graph, it had a very small audience, but that lack of financial success led Mencken and Nathan to cynically start popular pulps, including the well-known Black Mask, to fund their real interest in publishing works with lasting literary and aesthetic value. Mencken’s model was to use popular magazines to fund other types of writing—political or literary—that might not find a large audience. Mencken, famously contemptuous of genre fiction and popular tastes, was a successful pulp publisher who fed those popular tastes.

When William Randolph Hearst bought the magazine and took complete editorial control around 1924 he changed the smart literary and culture magazine to a women’s magazine more like Cosmopolitan, and almost instantly its circulation went up 7-fold as you can see from the graph. With market share and constantly expanding circulation as the singular goal, the New Smart Set, that dropped both the subtitle and the focus on “cleverness,” eventually closed even with about five years of nearly four hundred thousand circulating copies during Hearst’s reign as publisher. This magazine’s circulation data suggests that its lasting cultural value is in inverse proportion to the bottom line and market share.

Craig J. Saper, Professor in the Language, Literacy & Culture Doctoral Program at UMBC, is the author of a biography of one of the most successful magazine writers, The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown.