SUNSET FOR 1914
Publishers' Announcement!
Sunset Becomes a Twenty-five-cent Magazine
BEGINNING with the December number, SUNSET, the Pacific Monthly, enters upon another stage of its advancement.
For many months the publishers of the Magazine have been experimenting, with their own money, to produce a magazine of two-fold quality—beautiful and efficient—and to learn the cost of doing so. Additional illustrations in color—the most expensively produced of any similar pages in the country—and employment of some of the leading writers of description and fiction in America, these have been the materials of this experiment.
SUNSET, as it is today, is the result. The change of price to twenty five cents means that experimental excellence now becomes permanent and the way is paved to go on to make a bigger and better magazine.
Under the stimulus of added resources, a big investment is being made to bring SUNSET to the point of excellence demanded of its new position. The pages of this announcement show definitely the extent to which the Magazine realizes its obligation.
The Personality of a Magazine
To be a regular and welcome visitor to the reading-tables of intelligent men and women, a magazine must have an individuality, a definite personality. Sporadic hit-or-miss efforts to stir by the shock of sensation, to catch the passing interest in a fad of the day or merely to fill the empty leisure of an hour—none of these things can establish a magazine as a constant factor in the life of a home. Not all magazines aim to be this; most of them hope for it; some of them achieve it.
Sunset, the Pacific Monthly, claims to have become such a factor in the life of one hundred and fifty thousand homes, in many parts of the world, because of a definite and consistent personality. It has been possible to create and maintain this individuality because the magazine is published with a definite purpose, separated from that of immediate profit, and because, in the fulfilment of that purpose, Sunset has consistently reflected the personality of the remarkable territory it serves.
The Pacific Coast of North America has a personality as individual and as easily recognized as that of the friend whose appearance attracts and whose activities interest us. It is a region of varied and in many respects transcendent beauty; it is a country thrilling with the pulse of new development, aflame with the ideal of turning waste places into homes, elated by consciousness that there is no better place anywhere for the larger life of earnest men and women. The mere reflection of this personality has been enough to make a magazine and to give it an important place among the publications of America.
The personality of a friend develops, grows richer, finer, more admirable as the years ripen it. The Pacific Coast obeys a similar law. Its magazine must keep pace or be an imperfect reflection. Sunset for 1914 is the answer to this demand.
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