Jan and John Maggs Antiques
The Magazine Antiques
When the first issue of a new magazine appeared in January 1922, its editor, Homer Eaton Keyes, observed that his new publication was "venturing into a super-modern world, a world self-consciously intent upon newness; purposefully disdainful of tradition, sublimely certain of its own special ability to invent, devise, design in and for the future, in terms of developing future requirement, without recourse to an obviously, indeed confessedly, incompetent past." Keyes confidently presents his new publication to "the tribe of collectors" who would benefit from the kinship of others in preserving heirlooms from destruction or neglect.
Today Volume I, Number 1 appears quite provincial, relying on local (i.e., Boston) scholarship. Keyes freely admits this:
...it may yet not be surprising if a brother rises from the rear row and remarks that he is pained to detect in this first number an unduly dominant aroma of cod fish -- this being his not altogether subtle way of suggesting that early New England concerns occupy a rather disproportionate amount of space in these pages.