"Puckish" meaning "childishly mischievous" is a 19th-century usage of the word, which led Shakespeare's Puck to be recast for the title of the satirical magazine, guided by cartoonist/editor Joseph Keppler. The cover quoted Puck saying, " "What fools these mortals be!" It was bought up by William Randolph Hearst in 1917 and closed down in 1918. The jaunty symbol of Puck, cast in zinc (as many inexpensive Civil War monuments were) and gilded, is conceived as a putto in a top hat who admires himself in a hand mirror over the building's Lafayette Street entrance, but over a second entrance he turns his mirror down to reflect the passer-by.
The Puck Building. Puck Magazine was housed from 1887 in the landmark Chicago-style Romanesque Revival Puck Building at Lafayette and Houston Streets, New York City. The steel-frame building was designed by architects Albert and Herman Wagner in 1885, as the world's largest lithographic pressworks under a single roof, with its own electricity-generating dynamo. It takes up a full block on Houston Street, bounded by Lafayette and Mulberry Streets.