Ralph,

Here is a short history of Frank Leslie.

LESLIE, FRANK
(1821-1880), publisher. Born Henry Carter in England, the son of a glove manufacturer, he placed the pseudonym "Frank Leslie" on his early drawings to conceal his plans to break free of the family business. At age twenty-two he was head engraver for the upstart Illustrated London News, the first systematic effort to provide pictures and texts in journalism. Leslie, however, was not fitted to be anyone's employee, and he came to New York in 1848 to take advantage of the opportunities it offered. He acquired capital as an illustrator, principally through work for P. T. Barnum, the promoter.

In 1854 Leslie brought out the first magazine under his own name. In the next quarter century he worked his name into periodical mastheads twenty-two times and published seventy books under the Frank Leslie imprint. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (1855-1922) was the first successful American venture to bring pictures and news together in a weekly. Leslie's career coincided with the rise of photography, a technological achievement that increased the public appetite for pictures. But the camera was little help for publishers during Leslie's life since there was no mechanical way to bring a photograph to the printing press. Thus magazine illustrations were done by hand. Leslie's breakthrough was in dividing the engraving into as many as thirty-two sections for individual engravers and then fitting the woodblocks together so that the seams fit. He could accomplish in a day what a single artisan had taken weeks to produce. Using these teams of engravers, he published pictures of events only a week old, a speed new to popular journalism.

Frank Leslie put his name atop his publishing house in New York and named his yacht and a private rail car after himself, but his achievements ranged beyond self-promotion. His newspaper covered the opening up of Japan, the Crimean War, and expeditions to the Arctic. He gave Americans their first pictures of striking workers and crusaded against unsafe milk. By turns, he celebrated and condemned the sport of bare-knuckle prize fighting. The Illustrated Newspaper published some three thousand pictures of the Civil War. More, it contained political gossip, fashion plates, and lurid coverage of crime. As Frank Leslie made the news pictorial, exciting, and kaleidoscopic, he anticipated what popular journalism would become.

Leslie's personal life was similarly colorful. In the 1860s he brought simultaneous suits against his son and his first wife. He lived in the home of his trusted editors, Ephraim and Miriam Squier. Stories of adulteries in the household spread through the rumor mills and enlivened the courts and the press of the 1870s; he married the ex-Mrs. Squier in 1874. The publisher was not without honors. He was the nation's commissioner at the Paris Universal Exposition (1867) and the representative of New York State to the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia (1876). The economic panic of 1877 forced Leslie into bankruptcy because of losses outside his publishing empire. The courts left him in charge of editorial policy. Mrs. Leslie took the name "Frank Leslie" by court order after his death and revived his publishing business by the end of the century.

Budd L. Gambee, Frank Leslie and His Illustrated Newspaper, 1855-1860 (1964); Madeleine B. Stern, Purple Passage: The Life of Mrs. Frank Leslie (1953).

Thomas C. Leonard

If you want to know a value for the book here is an example of what someone else wants for an orginal first edition in fair condition.

[US Civil War]. Leslie, Frank.
Frank Leslie's Scenes and Portraits of the Civil War The most important events of the conflict between the states graphically pictured.
Mrs. Frank Leslie New York 1894 Folio, pp. 480, illustrated with 512 line drawings depicting various aspects of the war.
Scarce. An amazing compendium of visual materials about the major occurrence of the nineteenth century.

Edition: First edition
Binding: Original Pictorial Cloth
Condition: Fair, backstrip tattered, inside clean
Book Id: 1243

Price: $175.00

I hope this helps,
Gary D. Bray