Shiny New Post

From the New York World-Telegram:

FOSTER SAYS TRUMAN SEEKS TO RULE WORLD.

Shiny New Post

It was the richest revenue-producing issue in the long history of the oldest U.S. magazine. The Saturday Evening Post that loaded newsstands and stuffed rural mailboxes last week was thick with a thumping $1,625,000 worth of ads. It was not so fat as the 272-page Post of Dec. 7, 1929, in the days when the Post was the top U.S. magazine (in recent years LIFE has led in circulation and advertising revenue). But last week's Post took in more money than 1929's best because the Post's ad rates were up, and so was its circulation. The Post's circulation recently passed 4,000,000 for the first time.

From the flying cowboy on the cover (see cut) to the gag cartoons in the back of the book, the Saturday Evening Post had changed a lot in 18 years, and generally for the better. There was more fact than fiction on the bill of fare, and the helpings were smaller. Of the ten articles, not one explained a tycoon's secret of success in terms of sobriety, thrift and an 18-hour day. The dowdy "Post Old Style" type was long since gone; clean-cut Bodoni dressed the pages. Up front the hors d'oeuvres included a chatty letters column, with a grateful note from Reader Robert A. Taft, a bitter bleat from a customer who said the magazine stank. (Right, said the editor; it was that new black ink. Printed fine, smelled bad. The Post wouldn't offend again.)

One new hand had done most of the work of lifting the Post's face. Five years ago, when the Post was in a slump, plump Editor Wesley Winans Stout stepped out. Before his chair had cooled, Curtis Publishing Co.'s President Walter D. Fuller set Ben Hibbs in it, and gave him plenty of elbow room. A tall, quiet-spoken Phi Beta Kappa Kansan, 45-year-old Ben Hibbs had been putting some spring in the Country Gentleman's step.

The Franklin Myth. In another crisis, a generation before, shrewd Cyrus H. K. Curtis had put in young George Horace Lorimer, who ran the Post for 39 years (1898-1937). Curtis had bought the feeble Post and its 2,222 circulation for $1,000 in 1897. (The logotype then read "Founded A.D. 1821." Curtis, stretching the facts a bit, changed it to "Founded A.D. 1728 by Benj. Franklin." Actually Ben didn't found it, but simply bought a magazine called the Pennsylvania Gazette, which eventually became the Post.)

By feeding into the Post the biggest of the nation's bylines, Lorimer made it the biggest nickel's worth on the market. Contributors ranged from Jack London, Rex Beach, Irvin Cobb and Ring Lardner to such post-World War I stars as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Clarence Budington Kelland, Katharine Brush and J. P. Marquand. What they gave the Post was not always their best, but it was their slickest, and it was good enough to push circulation beyond 3,000,000.

New Postmaster. But one era's highway is apt to be the next era's rut: Ben Hibbs found the magazine freighted with 8,500-word "short" stories, long "bootstrap" opuses on Men Who Made the Grade, a rather-be-right GOPolicy that wasn't confined to the editorial page, an audience that had grown old with Lorimer. Two weeks before Hibbs took over, the price went up to a dime. Hibbs and his 29-year-old managing editor, Robert Fuoss, set out to capture a younger audience with women in some of the seats. (Lorimer's Post had aimed at men.)

Hibbs ruthlessly trimmed his text, liberally boosted his prices (up to $600 for pieces by beginners and $1,500 for old hands). He pays $2,500 for a Norman Rockwell cover, laid out $60,000 for Admiral Halsey's forthcoming memoirs. He banished prettified dog portraits and elaborately styled gag covers, made the word Post stand out on the cover, and the words Saturday-Evening seem almost whispered. (The accent is the same in the radio plugs and the Post's smart promotion ads.) The success stories changed: "Today," Hibbs says, "we'd rather talk about the second mate on a freight boat than the captain of the America."

Currently the Post would rather talk about U.S. cities than anything: its series has run to 31 articles, none very critical or exhaustive, but powerful circulation pullers. On its editorial page, the Post still hews to a right-of-center line, but in its text pieces it sometimes wavers in a fashion bewildering to readers. When its left-wing Associate Editor Edgar (Red Star Over China) Snow wrote a series about Russia to the effect that U.S. folks don't understand the Russians but should, the Post ran it--and added a self-conscious little note saying: "Readers may be interested to know that the series . . . precipitated as lively a debate in the editorial rooms . . . as ever taxed the capacities of Messrs. Bevin, Byrnes and Molotov. . . . I believe it is high time that such an interpretation should be presented in a magazine of large circulation--in a magazine whose conservatism is so well known that it cannot be suspected of leftist leanings."

Post Haste. "We're conservative, but I don't think blindly so," says the Post's $74,519-a-year editor. "I consider Henry Wallace our most dangerous citizen, but we accept articles about him." Hibbs feels not at all defensive about his fiction, which is poorer than in the '203 (like magazine fiction generally). "But our readers seem to know what they want," says Hibbs. "We did without Tugboat Annie for seven years and the complaints never let up."

The readers get what they want, when it is what Hibbs (who considers himself an average reader) wants too. What they get is, among other things, fresher than before, but still not hot news. Until 1939, West Coast copies were shipped by boat through the Panama Canal. This week the issue of July 5 is being made up, but if something new has to be added, some pages can now be changed as late as 18 days from "Post day."

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