{"value"=>"<p>Series I consists of correspondence with contributors, or potential contributors to the <span class=\"title\">Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine</span>, and makes up the bulk of the collection. The files, arranged alphabetically by name of correspondent, largely contain incoming letters. However copies and originals of outgoing correspondence are present. Files also contain manuscripts, galleys (both master and author), page proofs, photographs, illustrations, booklets, and circulars.</p> <p>In some cases, files hold material emanating from the company’s other publications, such as <span class=\"title\">St. Nicholas</span> magazine, as in the William Fayal Clarke file. Interoffice correspondence and memoranda are filed under the names of editors and other Century staff, including Richard Watson Gilder, Robert Underwood Johnson, Clarence Clough Buel, William Webster Ellsworth, Sophie Bledsoe Herrick, Alexander Drake, and Timothy Cole. Some annotations by office staff are in shorthand.</p> <p>The <span class=\"title\">Century</span> magazine, and the subsequent books published from its serialized articles, were popular with a largely middle to upper-middle class readership. Correspondents include major writers, literary agents, civic and religious figures, scientists, inventors, and artists. Some larger files span a decade or more and show the development of relationships between editors and the author on a business and personal level, such as Mariana Van Rensselaer, André Castaigne, Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, and Anne Warner French.</p> <p>Correspondence illuminates the thoughts, reasoning, and process for editorial decision making, whilst annotations and notes on letters from editorial staff to one another provide candid insights into the philosophy and values of the editors and also the pragmatic side of internal office workings. Gilder and Johnson, published poets themselves, meticulously revised and edited contributions of verse. This is evidenced in the letters from authors giving their reasons for rejecting or acquiescing to editorial suggestions. Some files include manuscript proofs that contain the blue-pencil markups of the editors, but their efforts are primarily documented in the letters of the authors, which are largely approving and appreciative. Gilder’s editorial style took consideration of reader’s sensibilities, often editing manuscripts for taste and standards, removing suggestive or potentially contentious matter.</p> <p>Correspondence with literary agents such as Flora May Holly, Jeanette Gilder (Richard Watson Gilder’s sister), and A. P. Watt; and publishers such as Henry Holt & Co.; Houghton, Mifflin & Co.; McClure’s; and Curtis Brown document the nature and functioning of the marketplace for literary works in North America at the turn of the century. Watt’s file contains letters and telegrams offering material and negotiating terms for authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and Brett Harte. Such correspondence includes discussion on pricing and rights, author attitudes to editorial suggestions, and illuminates editorial decision-making via memos from staff to one another as annotations on letters.</p> <p>The changing political and social values of the time and the handling of those concerns by a major mainstream literary publication are documented in correspondence with civic reform leaders, religious and charity groups, scientists, and politicians. Critical reception of certain articles, editorials and editorial choices are documented in incoming letters, for example from W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Edna Kenton. Articles such as “Taking the Ambition out of the Working Man” which criticized labor union movements; and “Militant Women and Women” on feminism and the suffrage movement garnered many positive and negative responses that are scattered throughout this series.</p> <p>Correspondence with scientists and inventors document the editors' efforts to solicit articles on notable new inventions and discoveries. Examples include the Wright Brothers and Alexander Graham Bell on early flight experiments; Louis Boutan on underwater and John G. Doughty on aerial photography; and Thomas Edison on the kineto-phonograph.</p> <p>The editors' exacting concerns with style, format, and reproduction of images are evident in correspondence with the Century Company’s printer De Vinne Press, including discussions of grammar and usage, layouts, typeface choices, and printing rates. The importance of visual aesthetics to the editors and the control they sought to exert on the finished product is apparent in correspondence with contributing artists such as Joseph Pennell, Timothy Cole, Andre Castaigne, and Thornton Oakley.</p> <p>Correspondence with experts in various fields, to whom the magazine sent unpublished manuscripts for review, demonstrates the lengths to which the editors went in ensuring factual accuracy, including in fiction and poetry. This is documented in the correspondence of Henry Fairfield Osborn, William James Stillman, Okakura Kakuzo, and Worthington Chauncey Ford among others. Some author files contain complaints and corrections of articles by these third party experts, often alongside the author’s objections to or acceptance of criticisms. These are especially evident with subjects that generated strong opinion such as events surrounding the Civil War and the <span class=\"title\">Century</span>’s related series of 1884-1887.</p> <p>Gilder and Johnson's sympathy with various progressive era institutions and associations is documented through letters from charity groups, government commissions, societies, and clubs that were active during this era, such as the New York Association for the Blind, of which Gilder was the president. A number of files contain correspondence from such associations soliciting magazine space, endorsement by the editors, or money, as in letters from representatives of the Red Cross Society, the International Peace Forum, and Women's Suffrage Associations.</p> <p>This series contains character references that were requested by the magazine before publishing an unknown writer’s work, and are usually filed under the author's name. There are also a number of letters from family members or managers of estates of literary figures, and participants in the Civil War, offering their diaries, letters, and other original documents.</p> <p>Editorship of the magazine changed hands several times after 1913. Succeeding Johnson was Robert Sterling Yard who left after one year, then Douglas Z. Doty who remained until 1918 and was followed by Thomas H. Smith and W. Morgan Shuster, each staying only one year, then Glen Frank, and Hewitt H. Howland. Yard and Doty expressed their intentions to change the editorial direction of the magazine in letters to contributors, and also in published editorials. The reactions to these changes are reflected in letters from readers and writers, and in annotations and correspondence from staff.</p> <p>Years in parentheses indicate birth and death dates. Documents dating from before July 1888 may have fire, smoke and/or water damage.</p>"}