Funk & Fawcett

Book Author Copies Sold Live Alone and Like It Marjorie Hillis 100,000+ Wake Up and Live! Dorothea Brande 115,000 Life Begins at 40 Walter B. Pitkin 185.000 How to Win Friends and Influence People Dale Carnegie 579.000

Only in the sweep of a fad could such non-fiction sales records, as reported up to last week, have been made. Only reasonable was it also that such sales should arouse the envy of magazine publishers. In the past fortnight two veteran publishers from opposite poles invaded the psychoanalytical & adult education field. One was the defunct Whiz-Bang's Publisher Wilford H. ("Captain Billy") Fawcett, the other the defunct Literary Digest's Wilfred John Funk.

Publisher Funk's new monthly venture appeared last week, a 128-page 25-c- "Popular Guide to Desirable Living," Your Life--in format similar to Reader's Digest, whose printers (Rumford Press) also produce Your Life. To launch the new monthly, Mr. Funk formed Kingsway Press Inc., Scarsdale, N. Y., with part of the reported $200.000 proceeds from the sale of Literary Digest, made Brother-in-Law Bert C. Miller president. Vice president is Douglas E. Lurton. onetime supervising editor for Fawcett Publications, and managing editor of Literary Digest during its last year. Edited by Douglas Lurton, Your Life is a handbook of inspirational prescriptions for the sick-in-heart, is neatly cataloged to cover Life. Health, Love. Fortune, Charm. Children, Conversation and Words. Sample suggestions:

Life: ''Crawl out of your shell . . . and give people the chance to know you as you really are."--Dr. Louis E. Bisch in "Nobody Likes Me."

Health: "Only an alcoholic, confirmed or potential, can tolerate a drink the morning after without nausea."--Donald G. Cooley in "How Much Liquor is Enough."

Love: "When in doubt, don't."--Dr. Paul Popenoe in "How do you Know It's Love?"

Fortune: "Courage [is] the most invaluable commodity in our lives."--Lowell Thomas in "Courage is Saleable." "Make sure your socks will stay up when you cross your legs."--John Westing in "Holding That Job."

Charm: "Did you know there is glamor in your great toe?"--Arthur Murray in "Walk Gracefully."*

In Photo-Facts Publisher Fawcett offers little advice, much fact illustrated in encyclopedia fashion. "Jumping at conclusions," says Mr. Fawcett's "pocketbook of knowledge," "is all right if you have a solid base from which to jump. . . . Photo-Facts supplies a good firm groundwork of useful information from which to 'jump' accurately." Photo-Facts considered useful such stories as "White Man Westward" (Lewis & Clark), "Termite Menace," "Poe's Great Balloon Hoax," "Football From Pagan Rites." Added fillip was its "Newsstand University" section in which Dale Carnegie again bobbed up, this time with "Putting Yourself Across": typical Carnegie tip: "Do not fuss with your necktie or clothes--be always neatly dressed and let your hands hang at your sides." Professor Harold F. Clark of Columbia and Dr. Carl Norcross concluded Photo-Facts with a curbstone lesson in popular economics, "Easy Money for Everyone." A precept: ". . . Instead of cursing the other fellow who is better paid, the clever man hunts around for a field in which he sees there is more money." Like Your Life, Photo-Facts carries no advertising.

Fawcett colleagues trace this most cultural of the 20 Fawcett Publications to "Captain Billy's" own life. His schooling ended in the grades, was continued in extensive travels and omnivorous reading. In 1932 he divorced red-headed Antoinette Fisher Fawcett who had helped make his Whiz Bang sizzle. She immediately bought the smutty Calgary Eye Opener with her alimony.

If the very proper 25-c- Photo-Facts is late joining the company of such Fawcett magazines as For Men and Daring Detective it is because Publisher Fawcett long suppressed his desire to educate as well as entertain. Last October Publisher Fawcett got to thinking during a transcontinental train trip, stopped at Santa Fe and dispatched to Fawcett Publications Managing Editor Ralph Daigh a day-letter naming and outlining the structure of Photo-Facts.

Hastily Editor Daigh selected Free-lancer Frederic Mortimer Delano (fourth cousin to the President), 40, to help shape up Photo-Facts. A metropolitan "feeler number" in August was so successful Publisher Fawcett put on newsstands this week 175,000 copies of the first regular Photo-Facts issue, a modest figure in contrast to Fawcett's bestseller, True Confessions, which has reached 1,100,000 a month.

Nervous and physical strain of a 200,000 circulation first edition over, Photo-Facts Editor Delano found himself in a hospital last week. There he can read in Editor Lurton's Your Life: "The high-strung worrier can actually fret himself into serious organic diseases such as stomach ulcers."

*All told, Your Life is expected to do for honest citizens what Poland's ill-starred Our Life did for crooks. Short while ago in Warsaw police arrested the Russian woman editor and the staff of Our Life, "first professional journal" for thieves, burglars, robbers--an incredible publication which told how to break safes, commit burglaries without leaving fingerprints. Our Life advertisers offered window jimmies and burglary instruction. Police seized the long list of subscribers in Poland and abroad, arrested many in Russia.

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