Life magazine had been founded January 4,…

Life magazine had been founded January 4, 1883, in a New York City artist's studio at 1155 Broadway as a partnership between John Ames Mitchell and Andrew Miller.

Mitchell holds a seventy-five percent interest in the magazine with the remainder by Miller.

Both men will retain their holdings until their deaths.

Miller serves as secretary-treasurer of the magazine and is very successful managing the business side of the operation.

Mitchell, a thirty-seven-year-old illustrator who had used a ten thousand dollar inheritance to invest in the weekly magazine, serves as its publisher.

Mitchell had created the first Life nameplate with cupids as mascots; he later draws its masthead of a knight leveling his lance at the posterior of a fleeing devil.

Mitchell has taken advantage of a revolutionary new printing process using zinc-coated plates, which improves the reproduction of his illustrations and artwork.

This edge helps, because Life faces stiff competition from the best-selling humor magazines Judge and Puck, which are already established and successful.

Edward Sandford Martin had been brought on as Life’s first literary editor; the recent Harvard graduate was a founder of the Harvard Lampoon.

The motto of the first issue of Life was, "While there’s Life, there's hope."

The new magazine had set forth its principles and policies to its readers: "We wish to have some fun in this paper... We shall try to domesticate as much as possible of the casual cheerfulness that is drifting about in an unfriendly world... We shall have something to say about religion, about politics, fashion, society, literature, the stage, the stock exchange, and the police station, and we will speak out what is in our mind as fairly, as truthfully, and as decently as we know how." ("Life: Dead & Alive". TIME. October 19, 1936.)

The magazine is a success and had soon attracted the industry’s leading contributors.

Among the most important is Charles Dana Gibson, who in 1887 sells Life his first contribution for four dollars: a dog outside his kennel howling at the moon.

Gibson, encouraged by a publisher who is also an artist, is joined in Life’s early days by such well-known illustrators as Palmer Cox (creator of the Brownie), A. B. Frost, Oliver Herford, and E. W. Kemble.