How to Read a Drawer: Print Culture and Humour Practice in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine

This paper engages the stories, jokes, anecdotes and illustrations of a single “Editor’s Drawer” from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in the 1890s. Modulating between description, interpretation, and theorization, I risk pedantry in order to demonstrate the relations between humour and advertising during an important phase of the emergence of mass culture. The paper concludes by concentrating on how two readers—one a US traveling ad salesman, the other a Canadian druggist and entertainer—used magazine print conventions like layout to coin humour in their own business practices.