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D. D. Cottrell's Subscription Agency

This unusual time-capsule booklet offers a glimpse of America’s magazine world in 1905, from popular newspapers to specialized journals. It comes from a long-gone New York subscription business rather than a conventional literary author, which gives it a distinctly historical charm.

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Wholesale Price List of Newspapers and Periodicals

Wholesale Price List of Newspapers and Periodicals

by D. D. Cottrell's Subscription Agency

About the author

Published as Catalog No. 39, Season 1905, this work was issued by a subscription business based in North Cohocton, New York and identified as D. D. Cottrell's Subscription Agency. The catalog presents itself as the company’s twentieth year in business and says the agency was established in 1886.

Rather than a personal memoir or novel, the book is essentially a wholesale price list for newspapers and periodicals. It mixes sales copy, publisher advertisements, alphabetical listings of magazines, and bundled "club list" offers, making it a useful snapshot of how readers discovered and subscribed to periodicals in the early twentieth century.

Very little biographical information about D. D. Cottrell appears to be readily confirmed from the source material available here. What can be said with confidence is that this name is attached to a subscription agency whose surviving catalog now serves as an interesting historical record of publishing, marketing, and reading habits in the United States at the time.