Bundling, Reprinting, and Reframing: Serial Practices Across Borders

This article explores the circulation of periodical material between metropolitan and regional locations in early twentieth-century North America. It asks how the globalized consumer technology of the household magazine was being taken up outside of cosmopolitan centers through the framework of local, regional, or national concerns. For example, mainstream Canadian monthlies such as The Western Home Monthly and Maclean's frequently engaged with, or re-used, content and formats taken from New York publications. To understand these transnational publishing dynamics, we argue, it is crucial to attend to the material practices of magazines. The article analyzes several such practices, including both editorial and sales strategies. We look at the reprinting or reframing of complete features and of excerpts from other periodicals. We examine the simultaneous serialization of novels in American and Canadian publications, using a case study of Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese. And we offer the first critical discussion of “bundling,” whereby US and Canadian titles were packaged together as a single subscription. It argues that the affordances of seriality, particularly timeliness and increased circulation through decreasing prices, allowed editors to redeploy metropolitan print materials for a regional readership eager to imagine themselves as participants in the new project of modernity.