International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals
About Archives Practices Contribute Contacts Search

   

Periodical: Purdy's Monthly

Summary:  From Pat Deveney's database:

Purdy's Monthly.
A Metaphysical Journal.
1894 Monthly
Chicago, IL. Publisher: Purdy Publishing Company. Editor: Frances L. Dusenberry, editor (and manager of publishing house).
1/1, January 1894 (2/3 is 1895). 16 pp., 50 cents a year.

This was the house organ of Purdy Publishing of Chicago. The publishing house was started in 1887 by Frances L. Dusenberry and her sisters — primary school students of Frances Willard and prominent advocates of woman's rights and "food reform" and put out a wide variety of New Thought and occult works: the lessons of Emma Curtis Hopkins and "Eleve's" Spiritual Law in the Natural World., as well as works by John Hamlin Dewey, Will E. Garver, Coulson Trumbull, J. William Lloyd, Henry S. Chase, and Lois Waisbrooker. The journal followed suit, with articles by Eleve, Hopkins, "W.R.P., Jr.," W.W. Lesh, and others. Book reviews of the work of John Hamlin Dewey, Margaret B. Peeke, Helen Van-Anderson, and of the "White Cross Literature" published by Chas. B. Reed in New York. Noted in The Esoteric, ads v. 11, 1896-1897.

Frances went on to publish and edit Woman's News, and after the turn of the century ran a book shop on Randolph Street in the Loop while continuing the publishing house. She sponsored lectures on Henry George's economic ideas, Walt Whitman, and similar topics, but in the 1920s and 1930s carried books that the government during World War II judged too pro-German and insufficiently patriotic. In 1942, Frances was called before the grand jury investigating seditious activities to explain her relationship with William Dudley Pelley, Gerald K. Smith, and others, and Purdy Publishing was named among the "unindicted co-conspirator" publications in the subsequent "Great Sedition" trial.

This journal shouldn't be confused with Purdy's Monthly and Fruit Recorder of the same period, published in Palmyra, New York. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2/3, 1895).

Issues:Purdy's Monthly V2 N3 Mar 1895

Creative Commons License
IAPSOP materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
IAPSOP respects people's privacy and personal data rights.