Louis Antoine Godey

Louis Antoine Godey , 1804-78, American publisher, b. New York City. He was joint founder in 1830 of the Lady's Book (known after his partner's withdrawal as Godey's Lady's Book ), the first successful women's magazine. The magazine, which featured articles by famous authors and colored plates of the latest fashions, attained a circulation of 150,000 by 1858 and was considered an arbiter of morals and taste. Godey also owned a publishing house that produced such works as The Young People's Book or Magazine of Useful or Entertaining Knowledge (1841) and the Lady's Musical Library (1842).

Godey's Lady's Book (1830–98), monthly miscellany founded at Philadelphia by Louis Antoine Godey (1804–78). Sarah J. Hale, the editor from 1837 to 1877, exerted an important influence on fashions and manners, for the magazine was considered a criterion of taste. Among the articles and pictures of fashions were included stories and other contributions from Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Poe, W.G. Simms, and Paulding, although most of the writers were of a far lower caliber, conforming to the sentimental, moral, and didactic standards of the day. In 1892 the magazine was moved to New York, where as Godey's Magazine it published novelettes by Gertrude Atherton, Julian Hawthorne, H.H. Boyesen, and others. It was absorbed by Munsey's Puritan.