April Fool

When they got their first copies of the April Pageant, several newsstand distributors wired the circulation director to complain that the issue seemed to be all fouled up. On the cover was a pretty girl, but she was also on the back cover, only upside down, and with four eyes and four eyebrows. Inside Pageant were six pages (also upside down) revealing the sensational now-it-can-be-told story of "Garson Inconnu, the four-year-old who helped build the atom bomb," and other startling tales. On the other 156 pages of the magazine were conventional, right-side-up pictures and stories.

The weird make-up and atom story were to celebrate April Fools' Day. Though the stunt was hoary, Pageant's 32-year-old Editor Harris Shevelson thought it had worked well enough for the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung in prewar days to give the alien corn a try. For his nonsense section, Shevelson had even lifted one old'gag directly from the Zeitung: pictures of "man's first attempt to fly by his own lung power."-

The April Fool stunt was another Shevelson attempt to pep up the pocket-sized magazine he took over 15 months ago. In the year and a half before he arrived, Pageant had lost $400,000, and Publisher Alex L. Hillman (who also owns a dozen pulps and comics) was getting ready to shut it down. Intense, hard-working Harris Shevelson, who had moved over from the managing editor's chair at Coronet, zipped up Pageant's articles and covers, put in more pictures. Circulation for March was 350,000, and 400,000 copies were printed for April. Pageant was in the black for 1949.

Reaction to the April Fool stunt was mostly favorable--though a few readers berated Pageant for joking about such a serious matter as the atom bomb. Said Editor Shevelson: "I hope the April Fool issue will become an annual thing."

*When the fake photographs first appeared, U.S. newspapers were taken in, and reprinted them as news (TIME, April 23, 1934).

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