Puck (magazine)
Puck was the first successful humor magazine in the United States of colorful cartoons, caricatures and political satire of the issues of the day.
This led Shakespeare's Puck character (from A Midsummer Night's Dream) to be recast as a charming near-naked boy and used as the title of the magazine.
Puck was the first magazine to carry illustrated advertising and the first to successfully adopt full-color lithography printing for a weekly publication.
Interested backers wanted Puck in English so he published it in both languages for 15 years until he ceased the German version.
Shortly thereafter, Joseph Keppler died, and Henry Cuyler Bunner, editor of Puck since 1877 continued the magazine until his own death in 1896.
The Hearst conglomerate discontinued the political material and switched to fine art and social fads.
Within 2 years, subscriptions fell off and Hearst stopped publication; the final edition was distributed on September 5, 1918.
Over the years, Puck employed many early cartoonists of note, including, Louis Dalrymple, Bernhard Gillam, Friedrich Graetz, Livingston Hopkins, Frederick Burr Opper, Louis Glackens, Albert Levering, Frank Nankivell, J. S. Pughe, Rose O'Neill, Charles Taylor, James Albert Wales, and Eugene Zimmerman.
The steel-frame building was designed by architects Albert and Herman Wagner in 1885, as the world's largest lithographic pressworks under a single roof, with its own electricity-generating dynamo.
An 1890 Puck cartoon depicts President Benjamin Harrison at his desk wearing his grandfather 's hat which is too big for his head, suggesting that he is not fit for the presidency. Atop a bust of William Henry Harrison , a raven with the head of Secretary of State James G. Blaine gawks down at the President, a reference to the famous Edgar Allan Poe poem " The Raven ". Blaine and Harrison were at odds over the recently proposed McKinley Tariff .