PSR 1: Primary Source Report on BP Magazine June 1936 Issue

Mark Richardson

 

Front cover, BP Magazine June 1936 (BP Magazine "Front Cover Illustration")

Circulation

What can you find out about the circulation of the magazine? How would you characterise the circulation--was it limited, or popular?  Can you find out if that was considered expensive?

 

The BP Magazine was a quarterly periodical published from 1928 to 1942 (V. Kuttainen 8). Circulation figures are elusive, but Kuttainien et al describe it as “a major publication during the interwar years” (159). The magazine’s sophistication, cosmopolitanism and glamour, along with its variety of content, would have made it very attractive to the middlebrow reader. Similarly, its price of one shilling compares favourably to contemporaneous magazines such as MAN Magazine at two shillings, making it accessible to a wide audience. Due to wartime restrictions, BP Magazine was forced to cease publication in June 1942 (Auslit Database).

 Editor

Does the magazine have the same editor for a range of time? Can you find out anything about this person?  What is her or her background, education, training? If the editor writes for the magazine, what kind of things does he/she write?

 

Dora Payter edited BP Magazine across its entire publication span of 1928-1942 (Kuttainen, Liebich and Galletly 165), an noteworthy accomplishment in an era when female editors were rare (Auslit Database). Auslit’s entire biography of Dora Paynter is confined to one sentence: “Dora Payter was the editor of B P Magazine, the quarterly journal of Burns, Philp & Company Ltd., South Pacific traders and travel operators” (Auslit Database), however the JCU website “transported imagination – The Burns Philp Magazine” observes that she “introduced most of the issues with fullpage, effervescent editorial” (Kuttainen, Liebich, and Galletly).

 Implied Reader

After studying thoroughly a single issue of the magazine--ads, articles, stories, everything--consider its target reader implied by the magazine’s contents: age, sex, economic class, intellectual class, race, political position, and anything else that seems important

 

As a travel magazine, BP Magazine would appeal to the aspiring traveller, a person with a reasonable degree of disposable income, who can afford to indulge in a luxury cruise to exotic destinations every so often - “those stylish few able to grasp what was on offer” (V. Kuttainen 8). By associating travel with travel with luxury and aspiration, the BP magazine held strong appeal for the middle brow reader (Hammill and Smith 65 in V. Kuttainen 9), and "consistently addressed readers as belonging to one of the two highest social classes, or as aspiring to be like such people" (Ohmann 206 in Kuttainen, 9). Similarly, the advertising content comprises upmarket products and services, affordable to middle/upper class individuals but beyond the reach of those of more modest socio-economic circumstances, who are perhaps just recovering from the ravages of the Great Depression. The advertising content is summarised below:

Total advertisements	121
Travel, Cruise Lines or Airlines [19 - most frequent]	Fencing Materials
Alcohol [11] comprising beers and wines to upmarket liquers, fortified wines and spirits	Coal
Banks	Refrigerators
Beauty Products	Engineer's Supplies
Luxury and high-end foodstuffs	Mens fashion
Printers and Art reproduction	Ladies Fashion
Home Radio sets	Timber and Joinery
Scent/perfume	Boat Builders
Cigarettes [surprisingly for 1936, only one ad for cigarettes]	Elixirs/pharmaceuticals
Gold and precious metals [2]	Baggage
Ammunition for game hunting	Rope/twine
Game fishing equipment/trips	Taxi company
Import Export and Shipping freight services	Customs and insurance agents
Paint	Golf Clubs
Electric Mixmaster	Telegrams
Up=Market Accommodation	Garden tools
Electric Heaters, Central heating	portable typewriter

 

Additionally, the reader would be one who appreciates literature, as many prominent contemporary authors regularly contributed to BP Magazine. Among these are Mabel Forrest, Roderic Quinn, E. J. Brady, Vance Palmer, Mary Gilmore, Jean Devanny, Ruth Bedford, Dulcie Deamer, Ethel Turner, Ethel Anderson, Dora Wilcox and Will Lawson (Auslit Database).

 Contents

a.     In a single issue, what kind of content gets the most pages [creative: fiction, poetry, drama, visual art, music/ critical: cultural, aesthetic, social, political/ informative: travel, biography, history, news]

 The publication comprises 41 articles, of which 19 are devoted to travel or an aspect of travel, confirming that BP Magazine is overwhelmingly devoted to travel.

b. Advertising: Ratio of advertising to other aspects of the text. What kind of advertising gets the most space? Anything else significant about advertising?

46% of the magazine is devoted to advertising, indicating that Burns Philp relied heavily on advertising to generate revenue from the magazine, and to provoke reader interest. There are 33 full-page ads and 31 half page advertisements, confined mainly to the first and last sections of the magazine. As there are often three to four advertisements to a full or half page, the total number of advertisements approximates 120. Of these, 24 are in colour, often lavishly illustrated.

Advertisement, back page, BP Magazine June 1936 (BP Magazine "Java")

 The mid-section, from pages 14-55. is generally ad free [only 2 full page ads in this section], while the first 12 pages devote 77% of their content to advertising, with few articles. This concentration of advertisements toward the beginning and end of the magazine may have been due to BP’s targeted readership base, as its marketing model adhered to:

“the subscription model, which meant that advertisements remained in the front or back matter rather than being interspersed with articles and stories, as advertisers were now beginning to demand” (V. Kuttainen 6).

 The reliance on subscriptions is further evidenced by the subscription form interleaved between pages 88 and 89.

The mid-section comprises historical articles, a gossip column, an article with what we would term “celebrity news” [“Screen Successes”], a fashion section, a short story, articles on art and drama, camera studies of children and a veteran down on his luck who writes a best-seller, and eleven travel articles, a few of which are thinly veiled advertisements. This section therefore reflects the varied content of the magazine, but as a publication “dedicated to modern travel” (V. Kuttainen 8), it retains the thematic emphasis on travel throughout the publication.

c. If the magazine attends to social, political, or cultural issues, is there anything that helps you describe its position? 

BP Magazine appears not to feature articles of a political nature, nor does it discuss current affairs other than those occurring in the arenas of fashion or the arts. Rather, it “had an explicit mandate to promote travel” (Kuttainen, Liebich, and Galletly). The BP Magazine confines itself to travel and light entertainment, promoting Australian literary figures with a variety of short stories, and Australian artists and photographers with lavish illustrations and photographic portfolios. The Magazine enabled the reader to indulge in “travel writing, light fiction, full-colour advertisements, and profiles of travelling artists and authors, alongside regular book reviews and features on recent developments in film and theatre among other articles and items” (Kuttainen, Liebich, and Galletly).

Format

How many average pages per issue? Did it use colour?  How much?  Photography? How much?  How are images used?  Do they illustrate stories or article?  If there are illustrations, how do they make the magazine feel?

 

This issue is 106 pages which is consistent with the average length of approximately 100 pages (Auslit Database). The BP Magazine has been described by scholars as among “The most graphically impressive modern Australian magazines” (V. Kuttainen 1)’ Colour is used extensively, often lavishly, throughout the publication, but interestingly confined exclusively to the front cover and advertising, which could be an editorial strategy to keep publication costs down while maximising advertising revenue. Similarly, black and white photography is also employed extensively throughout the magazine. Photographs augment the travel articles with pictures of travel destinations, invoking a sense of the exotic, but are also used freely for women’s fashion, providing a feeling of luxury. Photographs of movie stars, starlets society figures and fashion illuminate the gossip and celebrity news items and invoke “sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and prestige,” (V. Kuttainen 8), while there is a nine-page camera study of the Kosciusko snowfields, and collages of children’s photos, travel destinations and celebrities. Every page has at least one image, with the short stories accompanied by two-tone artwork.

 

References

 Auslit Database. "The Bp Magazine." Auslit Database 2005. Web. 21 August 2020.

BP Magazine. "Front Cover Illustration." The BP Magazine. Brisbane Australia: Burns Philp Company, 1936. Quarterly vols. Print.

---. "Java." James Cook University: Victoria Kuttainien, 1936. Print.

Kuttainen, Liebich, and Galletly,. "Transported Imagination - the Bp Magazine." James Cook University 2020. Web. 21 August 2020.

Kuttainen, Victoria. "Illustrating Mobility: Networks of Visual Print Culture and the Periodical Contexts of Modern Australian Writing." Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature : JASAL 17.2 (2017): 1-16. Print.

Kuttainen, Victoria, Susann Liebich, and Sarah Galletly. "Place, Platform, and Value: Periodicals and the Pacific in Late Colonial Modernity." English Studies in Canada 41.1 (2015): 155-77. Print.