The Strand Magazine

• 1. Introduction

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  Readers once queued outside the London offices of The Strand Magazine, waiting for the next installment of a single serial. The Strand Magazine was a British monthly that mixed short fiction with articles on general subjects. It ran for 711 issues, from January 1891 to March 1950. Its circulation reached figures that few periodicals of its day could match. Its pages gave the world a face for Sherlock Holmes, a famous crossnumber puzzle and a cover that Londoners could recognise at a glance. How did one monthly gather so many famous writers? What kept it selling for decades, and what finally pushed it off the shelves? And why did the title keep coming back long after it stopped?

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• 2. Sixpence for Everyone

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  George Newnes founded the magazine in 1890, and the first issue went on sale well before Christmas 1890, even though it carried a January 1891 date. Newnes aimed squarely at a mass readership. An issue cost sixpence, which was roughly half the usual rate for comparable titles. The price did its work immediately. The first issue sold nearly 300,000 copies, and sales climbed through the early months. They then settled at almost 500,000 copies a month, a level that held well into the 1930s. Herbert Greenhough Smith edited it from the start and stayed in the post until 1930. The editorial formula paired short stories and serials with factual articles. The most famous character in that fiction appeared in the very first year.

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• 3. Holmes and His Illustrator

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  Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes short stories reached print first in The Strand, at least for British readers. Some had already appeared in American magazines, or came out in them at the same time. Several debuted in the American edition of The Strand one month after the British one. The artist Sidney Paget illustrated 38 of the Holmes stories in the magazine, including The Hound of the Baskervilles. His drawings helped shape the popular image of the detective. Sales reached their peak when the magazine serialised that novel. Doyle contributed other stories too, but Holmes was the draw. One later Holmes collection, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, was commissioned by a rival American magazine, Collier's, and that fact would matter across the Atlantic.

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• 4. A Crowded Table

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  Hercule Poirot arrived in The Strand through Agatha Christie's short stories, among them the tales later gathered as The Labours of Hercules. P. G. Wodehouse supplied most of his Jeeves short stories to the magazine as well. A few of those had reached American magazines earlier, or in the same month. The roll of other contributors is long. It includes E. W. Hornung, Graham Greene, Rudyard Kipling, W. Somerset Maugham, E. Nesbit, Dorothy L. Sayers, Georges Simenon, Leo Tolstoy and H. G. Wells. The list continues with Grant Allen, Margery Allingham, Sapper (H. C. McNeile), Edgar Wallace, Max Beerbohm and Dornford Yates. The cricketer-style name of C. B. Fry also appears among them. Yet one of the magazine's most lasting inventions came from a puzzle column rather than a story.

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• 5. Perplexities

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  Henry Dudeney wrote a brain-teaser column called Perplexities, and he edited it from 1910 until his death in 1930. He is credited with introducing many new ideas to the puzzle world. In 1926 he produced the first known crossnumber puzzle. That same year he wrote an article titled The Psychology of Puzzle Crazes, which analysed the public appetite for such diversions. After Dudeney's death, G. H. Savage took over the column. William Thomas Williams, who wrote as W. T. Williams, soon joined him. In 1935 Williams authored the best-known cross-figure puzzle of today, titled The Little Pigley Farm. The puzzle has since travelled under many other names. Among them are Dog's Mead, Little Pigley, Little Piggly Farm, Little Pigsby, Pilgrims' Plot and Dog Days.

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• 6. Fact Beside Fiction

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  Early issues of the magazine took readers on tours of London institutions. Subjects included the Fire Brigade, the River Police and the veterinary college. Winston Churchill wrote some of the articles that appeared in its pages. On one occasion a sketch of one of her children, drawn by Queen Victoria, was printed with her permission. These pieces gave the monthly a sense of range. A reader who came for a detective story could also learn how the capital's services worked. The magazine's look was as memorable as its mix of subjects, and a single drawing of the street outside its door did much of that work.

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• 7. The Cover

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  George Charles Haité, a Victorian artist and designer, drew the cover that became the magazine's emblem. It looks eastwards down London's Strand toward St Mary-le-Strand, with the title hanging from telegraph wires. The first version included a corner plaque bearing the name of Burleigh Street. Newnes later moved to the adjacent address of Southampton Street, and the plaque lettering in the design was altered to match. A variation of the same artwork decorated a sister title, The Strand Musical Magazine. The street on the cover also gave the magazine its name. That London identity did not stop Newnes from selling the title across the ocean.

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• 8. The American Edition

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  A United States edition of The Strand ran from February 1891 through February 1916. At first its contents matched the British edition, usually arriving a month later. Differences grew with time. Some fiction, such as The Return of Sherlock Holmes, was missing because the magazine did not hold the American rights. Some non-fiction, such as articles on personalities in the House of Commons, would not have interested most American readers. The edition was edited by J. Walter Smith. Its circulation was minimal in the early 1890s but was reported at 150,000 by 1898. Logistical difficulties caused by World War I led to its discontinuation in 1916. The British monthly carried on for more than three decades after that.

  In October 1941 the magazine shrank to the smaller digest size. It ceased publication in March 1950, forced out of the market by falling circulation and rising costs. It had normally been bound into six-month volumes. The final volume, number CXVIII (118), ran from October 1949 to March 1950. Its last editor was Macdonald Hastings, a distinguished war correspondent who later became a television reporter and a contributor to the boys' comic Eagle. In 1961 the title returned briefly as The New Strand, edited by Noni Jabavu. A lasting revival came in 1998, as a quarterly now based in Birmingham, Michigan. It has published John Mortimer, Ray Bradbury, Alexander McCall Smith, Ruth Rendell, Colin Dexter, Edward Hoch, James Grippando and Tennessee Williams. It still gives space to emerging crime and mystery writers alongside the established names.

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