The Saturday Evening Post has made thousands of issues of its weekly magazine, dating back as far as September 29, 1821, available online. For $15 a year, subscribers become members of the nonprofit Saturday Evening Post Society, receive print (six issues per year) and digital copies of the magazine with a 300-plus year history, complete access to the digital archives, and other membership perks. Subscribers can choose between a print + digital, print-only and digital-only subscriptions for $15 a year. The magazine currently has an estimated 268,000 paid subscribers, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, as cited by Folio magazine.

Though the magazine had been preserving covers for decades, the painstaking project began about 10 years ago with the magazine’s Indianapolis-based staff carefully scanning the archives, some fragile due to age. In an interview with Folio, CEO Joan SerVaas estimates the preservation project to cost millions of dollars over the course of three decades, including scanning, equipment purchases and staff time.

What’s next? SerVaas said they will make the archives searchable, an enormous job by anyone’s standards.

“I always say, “It took 200 years to get this material compiled and published, and it might take us 10 years to get it completed in terms of what I would like to do.’ It’s been 10 years now and we’ve got everything on the webpage, but we still probably have at least two more years before I get to the point where I’m satisfied with the searching capabilities online,” SerVaas told Folio.

In its announcement about the new online archive, The Saturday Evening Post dedicated the effort to Charlene Van Slyke.

“This tremendous work could not have taken place without the efforts of one dedicated individual, Charlene Van Slyke. Charlene’s enthusiasm, diligence and attention to detail has produced an exceptional record of our long publishing history. The job of scanning thousands of copies of The Saturday Evening Post has been a daunting task, made even more complicated by the fragility and poor condition of older issues. Yet Charlene has taken exquisite care that every page has been captured with the highest possible quality,” wrote The Saturday Evening Post.

The idea for a magazine like The Saturday Evening Post was originally conceived in 1728 by Benjamin Franklin, then 22, as The Pennsylvania Gazette. A partner stole his idea and the magazine failed a year later. Franklin and another business partner took over, sharing news and insights into the world, science, government and politics. That publication stopped publishing in 1800, but Franklin’s print shop would print The Saturday Evening Post with its list of 200 subscribers. It was printed on Fridays for mail delivery to Philadelphia on Saturdays.

The first issue of The Post was August 4, 1821. The first archived issue, dated September 29, 1821, was The Post’s ninth issue. The Saturday Evening Post chronicled many hot topics of the day including the building of the transcontinental railroad, the gold rush, the Mexican-American War in 1854 and the Civil War in 1861, among others. The Post published many well-known authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Insider Take:

This is an exciting but painstaking endeavor, one subscribers and history buffs alike will be grateful for. This was a huge undertaking, but a great way to preserve history and opinions and insights of the times over the course of nearly 200 years. Because the publisher is a non-profit organization, it has chosen not to charge separately for access to the archives, but this is a revenue-generating opportunity for the magazine to (1) attract new subscribers, (2) retain existing ones, and (3) generate a new stream of income to recoup some of its costs and fund future preservation projects.