PICKING UP CHATTER

Chatterbox was a magazine for children published in Boston. As such, it was a contender for the hearts and minds of young people that were occupied by the better-loved, better-remembered St. Nicholas Magazine (So there's that Boston-New York rivalry going).
This collected edition is from 1886, but like its rival, I've seen volumes dating into the mid-20s, at least. Online sources say both magazine went into the 1940s.

The plates are more than competent. Illustrations like these were the lingua franca of print before photography changed that. Everything looked like this: news magazines like Harper's Weekly, mail-order catalogs, penny dreadfuls. I wonder if people came to accept these detailed drawings as reasonable simulacra of reality, if they were accompanying a newspaper account, or a Civil War story in Harper's, or a nature article in Chatterbox.

I don't know if it's seeing these divorced from the time period, but Chatterbox had an odd way of presenting its material. I haven't doctored any of the captions below, they all seem just a little eccentric.

I would read a Western version of Tropic of Cancer.

Before I take leave, here's the cry of the itinerant fly-paper salesman.