The work has required him to fly thousands of miles in the past five years, be he still gets a bigger thrill from the man on the flying trapeze - who only flies a few feet!" Maxwell Frederic Coplan also published cover designs for The Literary Digest, from the late 1930s to 1960's. An article entitled "Maxwell Coplan | The Human Touch" was published in the January–February 1958 edition of Print, a popular quarterly periodical of the time. The following is an excerpt from the article: "For those tired of the slick or superficial photographs so prevalent in today's advertising, Maxwell Coplan's honest, direct editorial photographs come as a welcome relief...The secret of Coplan's wide success is his bond of sympathy with the subject that comes through. In discussing the many people he has met as subjects for his camera, he never fails to be enthusiastic about them and his work. Maxwell Coplan started to take pictures on an old Graphlex, bought in a pawn show on time payments, while still an art student. He now uses a reflex camera almost exclusively. Although he does studio work, he prefers shooting on location because he likes the challenge of the problems that evolve. This preference has sent him all over the world on assignments by leading magazines and national advertisers. In 1945 he published a book on circus pictures, an early love, that has become something of a classic in his field. Coplan recently had a retrospective exhibition of his work in the Westcott & Thomson Galleries, in Philadelphia, where his work was exceptionally well received." "I rank Coplan with the very best photographers now taking pictures in America. His sense of open spaces in relation to foreground is one of his outstanding characteristics. I would call him an outdoor photographer with a keen sense of the dramatic and a most unusual and original feeling for design. His warm and transparent shadows and the strength of his black lift his pictures out of the ordinary realms of photography." - Manuel Komroff