The Strand Magazine

''The Strand Magazine'' was a monthly British magazine founded by George Newnes, composed of short fiction and general interest articles. It was published in the United Kingdom from January 1891 to March 1950, running to 711 issues, though the first issue was on sale well before Christmas 1890.
Its immediate popularity is evidenced by an initial sale of nearly 300,000. Sales increased in the early months, before settling down to a circulation of almost 500,000 copies a month, which lasted well into the 1930s.

It was edited by Herbert Greenhough Smith from 1891 to 1930. The popularity of Sherlock Holmes became widespread after first appearing in the magazine in 1891. The magazine's original offices were on Burleigh Street off The Strand, London. It was revived in 1998 as a quarterly magazine.

Publication history

''The Strand Magazine'' was founded by George Newnes in 1890, and its first edition was dated January 1891. The magazine's original offices were located on Burleigh Street, off the Strand, London. The first editor was Herbert Greenhough Smith, who remained the editor until 1930. The magazine published factual articles in addition to fictional short stories and series. It was targeted at a mass market readership. The initial price of an issue was sixpence, about half the typical rate for comparable titles at the time. Initial sales were around 300,000, and circulation soon rose to half a million.Smith (2014), p. 153.

The magazine also published a United States edition from February 1891 through February 1916. In its early years, the contents of the US edition were identical with those of the UK edition, though usually with a one-month time lag. As the years went on there were some differences in the contents of the two editions, reflecting fiction for which ''The Strand'' did not hold the US rights (such as ''The Return of Sherlock Holmes'', which was commissioned by ''Collier's'' magazine) and non-fiction that would not interest most US readers (such as articles about personalities in the House of Commons). The circulation of the US edition was minimal in the early 1890s but was reported at 150,000 by 1898. The US edition was discontinued in 1916 due to logistical difficulties arising from World War I. The American edition was edited by J. Walter Smith.

The magazine format changed to the smaller digest size in October 1941. ''The Strand Magazine'' ceased publication in March 1950, forced out of the market by declining circulation and rising costs. Its last editor was Macdonald Hastings, distinguished war correspondent and later TV reporter and contributor to the ''Eagle'' boys' comic. In 1961 the magazine was briefly revived as ''The New Strand'' under the editorship of Noni Jabavu.

It was normally bound as six-monthly volumes, from January to June and July to December, but from the mid-1930s this varied, and the final volumes in the late 1940s ran from October to March and April to September, the final volume CXVIII (118) running from October 1949 to March 1950.

The magazine was revived in 1998 in the USSmith (2014), p. 154. (see below).

Fiction

The Sherlock Holmes short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle were first published in ''The Strand'' in the UK. Some of the stories were previously or simultaneously published in US magazines, while several were first published in the United States in the US edition of ''The Strand Magazine'' a month after being published in the UK edition. 38 of the Sherlock Holmes stories, including ''The Hound of the Baskervilles'', were illustrated by Sidney Paget in ''The Strand''. Paget's illustrations helped form the popular image of Holmes. With the serialisation of Doyle's ''The Hound of the Baskervilles'', sales reached their peak. Readers lined up outside the magazine's offices, waiting to get the next installment. Doyle also wrote other stories that were published in ''The Strand Magazine''.

A number of short stories by Agatha Christie were first published in ''The Strand'' in the UK, such as the Hercule Poirot stories collected in ''The Labours of Hercules''. Many short stories by P. G. Wodehouse, including most of Wodehouse's Jeeves short stories, were first published in ''The Strand'' in the UK (some were published earlier or in the same month in US magazines).

Other contributors included E. W. Hornung, Graham Greene, Rudyard Kipling, W. Somerset Maugham, E. Nesbit, Dorothy L. Sayers, Georges Simenon, Leo Tolstoy, and H. G. Wells