The Gentleman's Magazine - First General Interest Magazine in the World

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The Gentleman's Magazine  is considered as the first general interest magazine in the world. It was first published in 1731 in London under the editorship of Edward Cave under the pen name Sylvanus Urban. It was the first publication which use the term Magazine with its name. The term  originated from the Arabic term 'makazin' or the French term 'magazine' both means storehouse. 

The original complete title of the magazine was The Gentleman's Magazine: or, Trader's monthly intelligencer. The aim of it was to create a monthly digest of news and commentary on all topic the educated public might be interested in. It contain articles on education, literature, language, administration, arts, science and so on. It carried original content from a stable of regular contributors, as well as extensive quotations and extracts from other periodicals, books and even from pamphlets. Samuel Johnson joined with The Gentleman's Magazine as first regular employment as a writer in 1738. Since then it started to publish parliament reporting.

A skilled businessman, Edward Cave developed an extensive distribution system for The Gentleman's Magazine. It was read throughout the English-speaking world and continued to flourish through the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth  century under a series of different editors and publishers. It went into decline towards the end of the nineteenth  century and finally ceased general publication in September 1907. However, issues consisting of four pages each were printed in very small editions between late 1907 and 1922 in order to keep the title formally "in print".