THIS chapter concentrates on the magazine as a material object. Its contribution is partly methodological: the multi-levelled analysis practised here might be applied to magazines from other countries and other eras. At the same time, the focus of the chapter is determined by the primary themes of our research, so we consider the material dimensions of our chosen periodicals in relation to middlebrow culture and travel. In general terms, the way that any magazine places itself and its audience in relation to cultural and class hierarchies may be discerned through analysis of its design and layout, internal organisation, pricing, mix of content, and mode of address to readers. More specifically, one aspect of the Canadian magazines’ engagement with the middlebrow project is their presentation of travel—whether actual or vicarious—as a pleasurable form of self-improvement. This may be explored in relation to the format of the magazines by examining interactions between text and image, commercial and editorial content. Travel features and travel adverts are often structured by common image sets associated with, for example, sophistication and the exotic, or heritage and nostalgia. The role of the editor can also be imagined in terms of the practice of travel. Richard Ohmann's comment on turn-of-the-century American mass magazines is pertinent here: ‘The editor or his implied persona […] was like a tour guide, pointing to this thing as interesting, that as notable, another as worrisome, still another as curious’ (230). This is a helpful analogy, not least because it emphasises one of the qualities which the golden-age mass magazines inherited from their nineteenth-century precursors: the miscellany format. These earlier magazines were often made up of collections of largely unrelated facts, illustrations, and anecdotes, many of them offering information about far-off places. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the newly established Canadian magazines (especially La Revue Populaire and Maclean's) continued to draw on this periodical format. And if, as Ohmann suggests, the editor can to some extent be positioned as a tour guide, then the reader becomes a tourist, collecting impressions.