New Bottles

In its 90 years, Street & Smith has conceived and killed a fabulous brood of magazines. Last week this hoary outfit, king of the Deadeye Dick market in the gaslit days, unwrapped its first package designed for the neon-lit postwar world.

Out to newsstands went the September issue of Pic, completely redesigned. Readers of the previous dime, 50-page Pic, which was full of sleazy cheesecake, will hardly recognize the old girl in her new hairdo. The magazine has a new editor--tall, boyish Victor H. Wagner--and he has an assignment to make Pic straighten up and fly right after eight years of floundering.

Readers Wanted. The new Pic is a slicker two-bit, Esquire-like 120-page monthly aimed directly at the homebound G.I. Its thesis is that soldiers who yearned over pin-up girls in foxholes and wolf-howled in Paris will come home more sober and serious. To win them, Pic plans career pieces ("How G.I.s Can Become Farmers"), designs for living ("First Civvies in Five Years") and sidebar ticklers ("Widows Are Dangerous").

Pic's elaborate face-lifting is typical of the way oldtime Street & Smith keeps itself young. In fact, the old Street & Smith has been hardly recognizable since 1938, when white-haired, supercharged Allen L. Grammer moved in as president. He had spent more than 20 years as a kind of efficiency expert for Curtis Publishing Co., and made a small fortune inventing new printing processes. He found Street & Smith possessors of a building full of dusty rolltop desks, and coasting on its dusty laurels. He moved the offices into a skyscraper, and fixed up the foyer like a cocktail lounge. Then he went to work dusting off the laurels.

Penny Dreadfuls. S. & S. goes back to 1855 when Printer Francis Shubael Smith and Bookkeeper Francis S. Street took over a broken-down fiction magazine. They added a few magazines of their own, and reached a pulp peak during the long presidency of Smith's son, Ormond, who loved fine wines and rare first editions. Ormond Smith kept presses busy pouring out dime novels (they usually cost a nickel).

For Street & Smith, Nick Carter (in real life, Colonel Frederick Van Rensselaer Dey) pounded out a novel (30,000 words) a week. Burt L. Standish (William Gilbert Patten) manufactured 30,000 words a month about Frank Merriwell. Other S. & S. standards: Oliver Optic (William T. Adams), Horatio Alger Jr.

If a theme proved popular, Street & Smith rode it to death. There were 400 volumes about Buffalo Bill, 1,000 about Frank Merriwell. Grammer wishes he knew how many different books and magazines S. & S. has put out. Some old hands estimate it as over 10,000 titles.

Along with the pulp books, Street & Smith built pulp magazines (Ainslee's, Top Notch, etc.), which kept going when the penny-dreadful fad passed. Some, like Western Story, still have a cozy 400,000 circulation. They have followed every change in public taste from the Western plains to the sea, to the air, to cops & robbers, and back to cowboys. At the crest, when it sold 95 million magazines and pulps a year, S. & S. had a stable of such writers as Upton Sinclair (who wrote under the name of Ensign Clark Fitch, U.S.N.), Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton and 0. Henry.

Up from Pulp. Just like the dime novel, the pulp magazines had their day.

It began to end just about the time Grammer moved in. The pulps (only 7 are left) are almost a sideline now. The largest slice of Street & Smith's profits comes from Mademoiselle (Milly around the office), 354-page, ad-packed junior Vogue (circ. 433.830). Charm, designed for business girls ("Men Crave Resistance"), is another success.

With these, Publisher Grammer has emerged as something of a teenagers' Conda Nast. Pic's new format may do as much for him in the young men's field.

Deadeye Dick might not recognize the old place but Horatio Alger would appreciate the results.

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