The Press: Esquire

A “class” magazine for men—like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue for women— has long been a publisher’s daydream. Last week it appeared. Its name: Esquire, “The Quarterly for Men.”

Price 50¢ the copy, Esquire’s first issue was composed of 116 large pages of shiny paper, 40 of them printed in color. Even more inviting than the handsome format of Esquire was its table of contents, in which each item had been selected not for artistic or literary merit but on the criterion of “an especial appeal for men.” The first issue contained an article on marlin fishing by Ernest Hemingway; an article on Burlesque, called “I Am Dying, Little Egypt,” by Gilbert Seldes; an interview with Nicholas Murray Butler by Artist Samuel Johnson-Woolf. Charles Hanson Towne had a piece about his favorite subject, “The Lost Art of Ordering” (meals); Ring Lardner Jr. wrote solemnly about undergraduate guzzling at Princeton. There were stories by John Dos Passos, William McFee, Manuel Komroff, Morley Callaghan, Erskine Caldwell, Dashiell Hammett, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Vincent Starrett. Bobby Jones, Gene Tunney, Benny Leonard, Charley Paddock wrote about sports. There were cartoons by Alajalov, John Groth, Steig and four others, funny pieces by George Ade, Montague Glass, Harry Hershfield, photographs by Gilbert Seehausen, Paul Trebilcock, poetry by Joseph Auslander. Finally there were 14 pages with colored illustrations about clothes for all kinds of men, from “the college lower class man or senior prep” to that other hero of men’s fashion journalism, “the experienced race-goer.”

In the pages about clothes lay the explanation of Esquire’s origin. Two years ago, the publishers of Esquire started Apparel Arts, a slick quarterly modeled on FORTUNE, to serve as an advertising medium for clothes wholesalers. Retailers, who left copies of Apparel Arts ($1.50 each) lying about, found that their customers took them home. The smart publishers put out another quarterly, Apparel Arts, Fabrics & Fashions, which was circulated among retailers who distributed it to their good customers. It illustrated colored pictures of men’s fashions with glued-in swatches of the actual materials used in the suits, ties, handkerchiefs, socks, shoes and suspenders. Esquire will goto newsstands as well as to smart men’s shops which can either give them away or sell them to patrons. Circulation of the first issue of Esquire (its cover several shades of green and vermilion) was 100,000, in shops and on 10,000 selected newsstands.

Publishers of Esquire and Apparel Arts are William Hobart Weintraub and David A. Smart, who have been men’s fashion arbiters for a dozen years, maintain correspondents all over Europe and the U. S. Editor of both magazines is young Arnold Gingrich, eight years out of the University of Michigan, who like his employers, keeps erratic hours but considers himself more the artist, less the businessman than they. In informal notes surrounding the brilliant table of contents in the first issue of Esquire, Editor Gingrich explained some of its purposes beyond offering an attractive medium to advertisers of men’s accessories: “Esquire aims to become the common denominator of masculine interests—to be all things to all men. … It aims to be among other things, a fashion guide for men. But it never intends to become, by any possible stretch of the imagination, a primer for fops.”