Friday, April 23, 2010

Resurrecting a Long Dead Magazine


Robert Whiteman, notes The New York Times, is feverishly working on putting long-since gone Liberty Magazine back into circulation digitally.

From the story...

Mr. Whiteman, a courtly man of 84, owns a treasure trove of all the material, including artwork, produced for Liberty. Much of the Liberty library that he bought is work by some of the world’s most famous writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Bernard Shaw and H. L. Mencken are a few who contributed to the magazine. Others, famous in different arenas, also wrote for Liberty, including Winston Churchill, Joe DiMaggio, Benito Mussolini and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Mr. Whiteman has spent the last couple of years collating and organizing the collected materials of the magazine, 1,387 issues’ worth, in the well-appointed basement of his Westchester County home, with the help of an assistant.

That interest is partly personal obsession and retirement hobby, but also reflects Mr. Whiteman’s hope that he can turn Liberty into something of a business again by using a Web site to garner interest in the material that he plans to shop to book publishers and television and film producers.

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