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From Pat Deveney's database:
Attainment.
The Magazine of Success.
1915--1916? Monthly
Los Angeles, CA. Language: English.
Publisher: A. Dell Segno. Editor: Charles Frederic Wallraff.
Succeeds: Segnogram; Opportunity
Corporate author: American Institute of Mentalism 1/1, January 1915. 32 pp., $1.00 a year. This was an attempt to continue the profitable work of A. Victor Segno (1870- ?), one of the greatest of the international mail-order confidence men, in marketing lessons, books and panaceas. The publisher was Annie Dell Segno, the (by the date of this journal) ex-wife of Segno, who had run off to Europe in 1911 with his (married) secretary. Annie, who had learned from Segno how to protect her own interests, ended up with the American Institute of Mentalism and the rights to Segno's books, which the journal prominently advertised in its pages. She also advertised her Life Culture Society at the same address, which prompted readers to "Avoid Typhoid and Kindred Diseases by Drinking Distilled Water," and "Health, How to Obtain It, and How to Keep It." The journal itself consisted of anonymous filler on "Friends and Friendship," "Building a Business," "The Despised Details," "Making the Most of Yourself," "Concerning Salesmanship," and other truisms on the mental attitude that lead to Success. A reviewer's take on the contents is less cynical, opining that the journal "is full of messages calculated to bring help, hope, encouragement and inspiration, and which, according to the opinions of the readers, greatly increase the charm of living."
Related organization: Life Culture Society. |
| Claude-Generated Themes:
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Attainment: The Magazine of Success was a Los Angeles monthly of the mid-1910s devoted to getting on in life. Its articles — on saving money, salesmanship, overcoming obstacles, and building a business of one's own — sit squarely in the self-improvement and success-literature tradition, carried on the mind-power current of New Thought (success, prosperity, concentration, thought-force). The register is bracing and optimistic, preaching cheerful resilience and open-handed self-culture rather than séance-room phenomena. Its stray 'control' language is self-control, not spirit-control, and belongs to the prosperity gospel, not spiritualism.
Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description.
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