About The Lark

The Lark

The Lark was a humorous little magazine published in San Francisco, California, from 1895 to 1897. It was founded by the writer, artist and humorist Gelett Burgess together with a circle of young San Francisco writers and artists who called themselves Les Jeunes. Although it lived for only two years and twenty-five numbers, the magazine became one of the best remembered American products of the 1890s little-magazine movement, chiefly because its first issue contained Burgess's nonsense poem "The Purple Cow," a four-line verse that followed its author for the rest of his life. The magazine was deliberately unserious: its makers explained that the double meaning of its name was intended, since it would sing, as a lark sings, but would also treat the whole venture as a merry adventure, a lark in the other sense. Issued monthly in a small sixteen-page format and published by the San Francisco bookseller William Doxey, The Lark mixed nonsense verse, light satire, drawings and poster-like illustration at a moment when San Francisco possessed a lively bohemian literary culture centred on buildings such as the Montgomery Block.

Founding in San Francisco in 1895

The magazine grew directly out of a change in Burgess's own career. Born in Boston on January 30, 1866, Frank Gelett Burgess graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1887 and moved west to San Francisco, where he worked as a draftsman for the Southern Pacific Railroad before becoming an instructor in topographical drawing at the University of California at Berkeley in 1891. His university career ended after his suspected involvement in the toppling, in the early hours of January 1, 1894, of one of the temperance fountains donated to San Francisco by Henry Cogswell; his resignation was reported that March. Freed from academic employment, Burgess reconsidered his ambitions and, with like-minded associates, founded The Lark in 1895. The first number, volume 1, number 1, appeared on May Day, May 1, 1895, as a sixteen-page monthly. Before the official publication date, the local publisher and bookseller William Doxey, intrigued by the first number, agreed to act as the venture's official publisher. The magazine proved more successful than its makers had intended, eventually reaching a circulation of over 3,000 copies — a modest figure by the standards of the great national monthlies, but a respectable one for an avowedly frivolous little magazine produced by a small circle of friends.

Gelett Burgess and Les Jeunes

At first the magazine was edited and written primarily by Burgess himself, who took delight in inventing pseudonyms for his own contributions; in the first volume, four of the other named authors were in fact Burgess writing under different names. He was initially assisted by the writer and artist Bruce Porter, who designed the poster that advertised the magazine's premiere issue in May 1895. Around them gathered the group known as Les Jeunes — French for "the youth" — contributors who frequented the Montgomery Block building in San Francisco. The circle included Porter Garnett, who also took on editorial responsibilities, the writer Carolyn Wells, the architect Willis Polk and the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, whose first verses Burgess published in the magazine after Noguchi was introduced into Bay Area bohemian circles. Local artists including Ernest Peixotto, Florence Lundborg and Maynard Dixon contributed illustrations and cover designs, giving the small magazine a visual character well beyond what its sixteen pages might have suggested. Work associated with the magazine also included material by Robert Louis Stevenson, whose name appeared among the contributors listed for the collected volumes. The combination of nonsense writing and serious attention to design placed The Lark in dialogue with English fin-de-siècle magazines and with American contemporaries such as The Chap-Book, even though its stated intention was simply to be gay in the period sense of the word — light, cheerful and unburdened by solemn purpose.

"The Purple Cow" and the first issue

The first issue of May 1895 contained the item for which The Lark is still remembered: Burgess's illustrated four-line nonsense poem "The Purple Cow," published with a longer title presenting it as reflections on a mythic beast. The quatrain ran: "I never saw a Purple Cow, / I never hope to see one; / But I can tell you, anyhow, / I'd rather see than be one." The poem became Burgess's most widely known work. It was widely anthologised, was transmitted orally, often without credit to its author, and was described by one commentator as the most quoted poem in twentieth-century America after "The Night Before Christmas." A poster version of Burgess's accompanying illustration entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The poem's fame was a mixed blessing. Burgess spent much of his later career trying, without success, to surpass it, and he came to resent the way strangers recited it at him; years afterwards the publicist Jim Moran even turned up at Burgess's home with a cow painted purple. The magazine that launched the poem thus created, in its very first number, the single work that overshadowed everything else its editor wrote, including his later books of humour and his popular Goops verses about ill-mannered children.

Style, format and the little-magazine movement

The Lark belonged to the wave of "little magazines" that flourished in the United States and Britain in the 1890s: small, short-lived, editor-driven periodicals that valued wit, design and personality over mass circulation. Its pages were printed with attention to appearance, its illustrations were supplied by working San Francisco artists rather than anonymous stock, and its covers were treated as small posters. Florence Lundborg and Burgess himself supplied notable cover designs for the collected volumes, including the piping faun associated with the first book of the magazine. The contents mixed nonsense verse, humorous prose, light commentary and drawings, and Burgess used the magazine as a laboratory for the comic manner he later carried into books such as Goops and How to Be Them (1900) and The Burgess Nonsense Book (1901). His Goops — bald-headed, badly behaved childlike creatures whose manners were held up for ridicule — became a durable part of his output after the magazine ended, eventually extending to a syndicated comic strip in 1924–1925. The Lark itself, however, never attempted to become a general magazine; it remained a coterie production whose charm depended on the tastes of the small group that produced it, and its influence travelled through the later careers of its contributors as much as through its own pages.

Contributors and San Francisco bohemia

The roster of Les Jeunes illustrated the character of San Francisco literary life in the mid-1890s. Bruce Porter was a central figure in the city's arts scene as a painter, designer and writer. Porter Garnett became known as a calligrapher, printmaker and designer associated with fine printing in California. Willis Polk was an architect whose career shaped buildings in the Bay Area. Ernest Peixotto became a noted illustrator and muralist, and Maynard Dixon, then at the start of his career, went on to become one of the best known American painters of the West. Carolyn Wells, who contributed to the magazine's circle, built a long career as a poet, humorist and mystery writer. Yone Noguchi's presence connected the magazine to a transpacific literary story: he had arrived in San Francisco in 1893, was encouraged by the poet Joaquin Miller, published his first verses in The Lark, survived a plagiarism scandal in 1896 and published two books of poetry in 1897 before leaving for the East Coast in 1900. That such figures passed through a sixteen-page humorous monthly shows how little magazines functioned in the 1890s as meeting places where young writers and artists found first publication, experimented with forms and built the reputations they carried into the new century.

The Epi-Lark and the decision to end in 1897

The end of The Lark was planned rather than forced. Number 24, dated April 1897, was declared to be the last, but a final twenty-fifth number, entitled The Epi-Lark, was published on May 1, 1897, exactly two years after the first issue. Burgess later explained the decision in terms that booksellers repeated when describing the magazine: it was stopped because he wanted it to die young and in its full freshness, rather than dwindle into routine. The April 1897 number also contained his farewell to his most famous creation, a short poem titled "Confession: and a Portrait Too, Upon a Background that I Rue," in which he answered "The Purple Cow" with the rueful lines: "Ah, yes, I wrote the 'Purple Cow' — / I'm Sorry, now, I wrote it; / But I can tell you Anyhow / I'll Kill you if you Quote it!" The complete run therefore consisted of twenty-five issues, gathered into two volumes — Book I containing numbers 1 to 12 and Book II containing numbers 13 to 24 plus the Epi-Lark — printed in San Francisco by William Doxey, with the first issue printed by C. E. Murdock & Co. Sets of the two clothbound volumes, decorated with pictorial designs, became the form in which most later readers encountered the magazine.

Spin-offs: Le Petit Journal des Refusées and the Lark books

The magazine generated offspring even while it was running. One night in 1896 Burgess and his friends created Le Petit Journal des Refusées, a parody periodical purporting to consist of material written by women and rejected by other magazines; it was announced with a mock call for submissions in the sixth issue of The Lark, was printed on wallpaper and was cut to an irregular shape, making it one of the most eccentric American little-magazine productions of the decade. After The Lark closed, Burgess and Doxey recycled his contributions in book form, issuing The Purple Cow as a separate publication in 1899 and The Lark Almanack in the same year. His collection A Gage of Youth (1901) drew chiefly on poems first printed in the magazine. These reuses showed the commercial afterlife a successful little magazine could have: material written for a circulation of a few thousand could be repackaged for the book trade once the editor's name — and one very famous cow — had become saleable. Burgess himself moved to New York, wrote for magazines including The Smart Set, Collier's and Century, coined the word "blurb" in connection with his 1906 book Are You a Bromide?, and in 1910 wrote "The Wild Men of Paris," the essay that introduced proto-Cubist art, including the first American reproduction of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, to United States readers.

Legacy and reputation

The Lark lasted only from May 1895 to May 1897, published no more than twenty-five numbers and never reached a large circulation, yet it secured a permanent place in accounts of American periodical history. It was remembered as a leading example of the 1890s little magazine: brief, personal, beautifully designed and unashamedly frivolous. It gave early publication to figures such as Yone Noguchi and Maynard Dixon, preserved the milieu of San Francisco's Les Jeunes, and produced in "The Purple Cow" the most durable piece of nonsense verse of its American generation — a poem so successful that its author spent decades trying to escape it. Burgess died in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, in 1951, and his papers were preserved at the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, where the university that had parted with him in 1894 came to regard him as a former professor and literary talent worth honouring. For historians of magazines, The Lark demonstrated that a periodical did not need longevity or scale to matter: two years of deliberate lightness, ended by choice at the height of its freshness, were enough to leave a mark that far larger and longer-lived journals never achieved.