The Holiday Number: Puck in Full Color

From its English edition in 1877, Puck was the first American humor magazine to make full-color chromolithography its signature, and nowhere did it press that advantage harder than on the holiday numbers. The Christmas and Easter issues were built to be seen across a crowded newsstand and to justify their higher price. Where the weekly's inside pages carried political cartoons, the seasonal covers turned the same craft toward pleasure: skating parties, mistletoe, lilies, toy-shop parades, and the little cigar-and-mirror sprite whose motto, "What fools these mortals be," presided over all of it. The color was the argument. Deep reds held against greens, a woman's yellow gown glowing across a dim interior, a field of white blossoms that cheaper presses could not keep in register, all of it advertised what Puck's Manhattan press house could do that its rivals could not. The artists here span a generation, from Charles Jay Taylor and Frank Hutchins in the 1890s to Frank Nankivell, Gordon Ross, W. E. Hill, and a young Rose O'Neill after 1900. Read together, the covers trace how magazine design moved from painterly holiday scenes toward the flat, poster-bright graphics of the new century.