Constructing the Canadian Lowbrow Magazine: The Periodical as Media Object in the 1930s and 1940s

Abstract

ABSTRACT Historians of Canadian popular print culture commonly refer to a “golden age” of English Canadian periodical publishing (1940–46), which was the result of wartime restrictions on the importation of popular magazines from the United States. This article examines a corpus of Canadian periodicals published before and after this golden age. In the late 1930s, before the introduction of wartime measures, a handful of Toronto-based publishers launched titles that reprinted, revised, and repurposed material from U.S. periodicals. After the end of the war, when protections for Canadian periodicals were first dropped, then reintroduced in weakened form, Canadian publishers engaged once again in the reprinting of U.S. materials.