The Saturday Evening Post, 1821 – 2027

I miss magazines! I was lucky enough to write and edit for More, Art Direction, Movieline—all terrific magazines of which I was proud; all gone and vanished now. And the latest to bite the dust is the 205-year-old Saturday Evening Post, which will end its print run in January of next year (their website says they will continue an online version, but online versions can go jump in the lake as far as I’m concerned). The Post is best remembered for its Norman Rockwell covers (he was a good draftsman, but his facial expressions hinted at “massive stroke” rather than “heartwarming”—I am more a J. C. Leyendecker girl; he also did their covers). The Post featured such writers as Ray Bradbury, Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Edgar Allan Poe, John Steinbeck, Edith Wharton, P.G. Wodehouse, Carl Sandburg, Ogden Nash, and Dorothy Parker, among many others (as well as Ted Key’s Hazel cartoons). Current owner Cory SerVaas, whose parents revamped the magazine in the 1970s, says, “I think about my mother a lot, because she would kill me. She would not be happy, but she would understand."