To say that magazines were subject-making tools is not entirely
complete or accurate. In fact, magazines in the early par of the
twentieth century were powerful apparatuses not just for making
subjects but for organizing them - and most magazines saw this
as their primary purpose. The point was not just to make certain
kinds of selfhood possible, but to organize an audience of
readers into a consumer group. In Selling Culture, Richard
Ohmann argues that it was this organizing practice that marked
the birth of mass culture [note]. Before the 1890s, magazine
publishers made money selling magazines. Few of them were
specialized enough to claim a readership that was also a
predictable consumer group. Advertising was a supplemental part
of the business and served to bring in extra cash - it was
never, either rhetorically or economically, the main event. What
changed in the 1890s was that magazine publishers discovered
that they could make more money selling their readers than
selling to their readers. In 1907 one