Ohioana Quarterly Editorial
Spring 2008, by Editor Leslie Birdwell
Highlights from and covers of early issues
It is my pleasure to welcome our readers to the Ohioana Quarterly’s fiftieth year. I like to think that a future editor
of this publication fifty years from now will find him or herself right here, on this page, while sifting through the past 100 years for editorial material in 2058. Welcome to you too, and have fun.
In 1958 the title of the review was Ohioana: of Ohio and Ohioans, and we published twice a year.
Also in that first edition of 1958, there are familiar names like Willard M. Kiplinger (as in Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine and the
Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism). In the Latest Books section (what we now call Books Received),
other familiar names pop up: Elliott Ness (the original Untouchable who died the year before),
Kenneth Patchen (his verve in word and line still unmatched), and Arthur M. Schlesinger (Sr., not Jr.). On the cover of the
Autum issue, 1966, the name was changed to Ohioana Quarterly, and editor Bernice Williams Foley explained the change in the
cover’s look with the switch from commercial artist Robert L. Creager to Caroline Williams as the featured artist.
For ten years, we printed advertising on the inside front cover; a shock on first glance.
What’s an advertisement doing in our non-profit’s review journal? However, it makes sense: the ads were for
Webster’s New World Dictionary, perhaps because the World Publishing Company used to be in Cleveland.
By 1967, the company was a subsidiary of the Times Mirror Company, and was in both Cleveland and New York.
The Quarterly either stopped accepting advertising in 1969, or perhaps by then the company had left the state, ending its Ohio-based connection.
Photographs and typography reflect the styles of the times. Both inside and outside
versions of the title word “Ohioana” in the summer of 1966 are rendered in a
West Coast, love-trip style of font (and the word “summer” on the cover, in keeping with the style of the times, is nearly impossible to read) --
and portraits reveal that women’s hats have undergone a revolution since 1958.
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