Press: Knapp’s Week

East of the Rockies live 26,000,000 families. To one in every six of those households this week (Feb. 24) goes a new Sunday newspaper magazine section called This Week. Twenty-one newspapers, ranged alphabetically from the Atlanta Journal to the Washington Star, geographically from the Boston Herald to the Dallas News, will carry the new supplement in place of their old home-made magazine sections.

For excellent reason no Hearstpaper is in the group. Hearstpapers have their own uniform magazine section, prosperous & preposterous American Weekly. This Week is the first serious effort to compete with American Weekly for national advertising in color. Against Mr. Hearst’s 6,000,000 Sunday readers, This Week claims slightly more than 4,000,000. Advertising rate: $11,200 a color page (tabloid size).

On the circulation front there will be less competition. Lovers of American Weekly’s gaudiness will find little to excite them in This Week. Printed in color gravure, This Week is edited by Mrs. William Brown Meloney, genteel white-haired editor of the New York Herald Tribune’s magazine (TIME, Oct. 8). First issue includes fiction by Sinclair Lewis, Rupert Hughes, Fannie Hurst; articles by Britain’s Lord Strabolgi, Scientist Roy Chapman Andrews, Artist Neysa McMein —big names which the average individual Sunday newspaper could not conveniently buy.

Of the 4,000,000 who are expected to thumb This Week’s pages, practically none will have the remotest idea whose show it is. Even if they knew the man’s name— Joseph Palmer Knapp—it would mean little or nothing to them: just as it means nothing to the 8,250,000 readers of Collier’s, American Magazine, Woman’s Home

Companion, Country Home, although rich old “Joe” Knapp practically owns those magazines as majority stockholder of Crowell Publishing Co.

Nearing 71, “Joe” Knapp is one of the most potent figures in the printing & publishing business, and the least conspicuous.

Brooklyn-born, son of the founder of Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., Joseph Knapp was an early partner of the late Tobacco Tycoon James Buchanan Duke (see p. 59) in publishing the defunct New York Recorder. One of the first to tinker with multiple color printing, he founded American Lithographic Co. Thirty years ago he first tried the Sunday supplement idea with a company called Associated Sunday Magazines, but it failed miserably for various reasons when the War kited the cost of newsprint.

When a smart promoter raised the idea of This Week two years ago, he found Joseph Knapp ready and eager to back it. Since his first attempt, Mr. Knapp had built up Alco Gravure, Inc., biggest rotogravure printers in the U. S. He acquired high-speed color presses that could whip out four copies per second of a magazine the size of This Week. With difficulty, Mr. Knapp’s salesmen sold the idea to the 21 newspapers. Then they stormed the advertisers, booked for the first year some $7,000,000 worth of business.

Tall, white-haired, blue-eyed, “Joe” Knapp remains behind the scenes of his business enterprises, occupies offices of his own in a separate Manhattan building. But he is the complete autocrat.

His cronies are Steelman Myron Taylor, Morgan Partner Thomas W. Lament. Fabulous stories surround his passion for outdoor life. He owns four miles of trout stream in New York’s gamey Beaver Kill, issued gold-engraved membership cards to a half-dozen friends. In North Carolina “Joe” Knapp owns Knotts Island, a 5,000-acre preserve. Becoming attached to the country and its citizenry, he spent some $500,000 to give it a school system, vast sums for roads and other improvements. Once when “Joe” Knapp and a party of friends were dashing in a sea-sled to his Canadian fishing camp for salmon, the boat broke down. Instantly he resolved to buy the boat company, improve the craft, sell sea-sleds in mass production like Fords. After buying and building, he discovered that masses of people did not want a 40 m.p.h. boat that could not be used at night. “And that,” said he last week, “was one of the old man’s ideas that didn’t turn out so well.”