The Great Depression. Pearl Harbor. The House Committee on UnAmerican Affairs. Watergate. The big, dramatic moments in U.S. history were all recorded in the pages of Pacific Shipper.

The events were always viewed from the standpoint of America’s Pacific Coast and filtered through the lens of transportation and international trade, but they were all faithfully covered.

Transportation’s big moments were also captured. Week after week, Editor and

Publisher George E. Martin printed small items that seemed somewhat insignificant on their own. But looking back, those little things often added up and became significant trends — such as intermodalism — and Pacific Shipper’s readers had been in on them from the beginning.

When Martin launched Pacific Shipper in February 1926, he declared that “The Pacific Shipper is to be a practical paper; a publication without frills or fancies.

“The Pacific Shipper comes to serve. It has a definite purpose, a single purpose, and that is to compile accurately and in handy form the information that the Pacific Coast ocean shipper and consignee normally and most frequently require.”
For 83 years, the magazine has served a practical purpose for its subscribers.

Certainly Pacific Shipper is best known for its sailing schedules, and putting that information together in a timely fashion wasn’t an easy task in 1926.
But the information went beyond the comings and goings of vessels.

Pacific Shipper’s readers knew the best places in the world, at any given time, to buy rubber, cotton or raw silk.

They could also find the price of a postage stamp in just about any country.

And when Martin said he would present his information “without frills or fancies,” he was serious, indeed. He employed no photographers and no illustrators. There were no long, artistic feature stories and no attempts to spin a yarn. In fact, more than a decade passed before any stories in Pacific Shipper sported a headline.

Martin was writing for people who wanted, who needed, information. That’s the approach we have taken for the past 4,316 issues.

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