The American Home

The American Home

June 1930 issue of The American Home
Frequency	Monthly
Year founded	1928
First issue	October 1928
Final issue	1977
Country	USA
Based in	New York City

The American Home was a monthly magazine published in the United States from 1928 to 1977. Its subjects included domestic architecture, interior design, landscape design, and gardening.

The American Home was a continuation of the magazine Garden & Home Builder. It was published by Nelson Doubleday of Doubleday, Doran & Company. Ellen Diffin Wangner edited the first issues, October 1928 to March 1929.The American Home lost money its first four years, and occasionally entire issues would be omitted. William Herbert Eaton, its circulation manager, became publisher in 1932, and subsequently bought the magazine in 1935, forming American Home Publishing Company, which continued to publish it in New York City until he sold the magazine in 1958 to Curtis Publishing Company, its single-copy distributor. Under Eaton, the magazine was refocused toward the upper middle class reader, leaving the higher end of the home market to fellow Doubleday magazine Country Life, which Eaton also bought.

By 1953, The American Home had a paid circulation of over 3 million copies, reaching a peak circulation of 3.7 million in 1962. As part of its desire to move out of mass circulation publications, Curtis sold the magazine in 1968 to Downe Communications,. John Mack Carter purchased the magazine in 1973, and it was acquired in late 1975 by the Charter Company.

In 1975 Charter Company President and Chairman Raymond K. Mason installed Leda Sanford as president, publisher and editor-in-chief with a mandate to re-position the magazine and stem losses by attracting new readership. Sanford was the first female publisher of a national American magazine. Her goal was to maintain a circulation of 2.5 million and appeal to newly liberated women. Sanford said she wanted the magazine to “speak intelligently to the college-educated and informed woman,” telling the targeted reader how to “run her home with flair, beauty and pizzazz.” The publication saw slight gains, but it wasn’t enough to save what the New York Times referred to as a “fixture on the American publishing scene.”