…Earle MacAusland, Gourmet's fifty-eight-year-old founder and publisher.A New Englander who had worked in the magazine business most of his life, it was said that MacAusland had begun Gourmet less on the basis of the market research or his expertise in food than to create a vehicle through which to satisfy his own curiosity about what he called "the summum bonum of living." In any case, the magazine was a genuine innovation in December 1941, when food journalism consisted mostly of newspaper women's pages, cookery school organs like American Cookery, and amateur newsletters and privately distributed quarterlies published by gourmet societies. Moreover, in the quality of its writing and design and the catholicity of its interests, Gourmet embodied not just the Eurocentric taste of the gastronomic elite, but some of the influence of the culinary nationalists and avant-garde eclecticism of a Merle Armitage. Still, at its core, the magazine reflected MacAusland's penchant for Martini's, English suits, good china, and French food. France may have been the "summum bonum," but it was to be attained via England, or rather through the American Anglophilia in which Britain represented a society untainted by vulgarity and consumerism, consisting entirely of honest peasants, genial aristocrats, Noel Coward-like sophisticates, and spaniels and port by the manor fireside.

From -James Beard- A Biography by Robert Clark, 1993.

The Earle R. MacAusland collection consists of his personal set of bound Gourmet Magazine, three original framed covers by the artists