Press: Christmas Annuals

For most proper British magazines, their Christmas number is the climax of the year. By last week, most major British magazines had shipped out their cheery, dowdy Christmas annuals to make the Holidays complete for homesick Britons all over the world. Heading the list was the venerable funnybook Punch, with its Almanack for 1937, which was like any other issue of Punch except that it had a cover in color by Ernest Howard (“When We Were Very Young”) Shepard, many a color page inside.

Like its rival, Sketch, the Toiler combined fiction and fun in its Christmas annual. Both magazines had colored centre spreads, Tatter’s by Comic Artist Henry Mayo Bateman, who contributed “The Gigolo Who Refused to Dance”; Sketch’s by the late Sporting Artist Cecil Aldin who drew a Dickensian “Christmas Coach Crossing Marlborough Downs.” With art lovers, Sketch went one up by giving away a colored insert of “Ballet” by Dame Laura Knight, A. R. A. The London Sphere’s Christmas annual featured the Victoria & Albert Museum’s wax “Nativity,” while the Illustrated London News had 27 color pages and some of the world’s most brilliant whiskey advertising.

Most famed of British annuals is probably the children’s Chatterbox, which for well-brought-up English and American moppets has long been a Christmas staple. This year Chatterbox was issued by London’s Dean & Son, Ltd., who acquired it from the family of its late Editor Frederick Joseph Harvey Darton. Founder of Chatterbox was the Rev. Erskine Clark who started it in St. Paul’s shadow in 1866 passed it on to Editor Darton when he died in 1901. In the monthly Chatterbox, Canon Clark hoped to get children’s minds off “bad stories.” He succeeded so well that the bound volume of Chatterbox became a Christmas gift necessary in England to parents & children alike.

Peak circulation of the Chatterbox annual came in 1920 when 148,000 copies went to British girls & boys, 12,000 to children in America and the Dominions. Last year the monthly issues were discontinued, but the Chatterbox annual is still printed like a bound volume of a magazine, so that the instalments of serial stories are scattered piecemeal throughout the book. For Christmas 1936, Dean & Son have printed 30,000 copies of Chatterbox. In keeping with the times it features streamlined trains and aviation, but still carries old-fashioned school & cricket stories.

This year not an English magazine but one of William Randolph Hearst’s publishing properties furnished the newest entrant n the Christmas annual field. Celebrating its birthday, Manhattan’s 90-year-old Town & Country came out with a handsome 204-page issue, largest in its history, billed as America’s “First Christmas Annual.” Featured was a nostalgic article on old-time college proms by Town & Country’s fashion editor, Mrs. Chester La Roche, sister of Cinemactress Rosalind Russell; descriptions by Sportsman Foxhall Keene of his 18 injuries sustained in sport; and a two-page, full-color spread of “The First Christmas” by Gentile da Fabriano in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

For this Christmas annual, Town & Country printed more copies (40,200), booked more advertisements (101 pages),’ than for any issue in its 90-year life. * Oldest of the Hearst magazines, Town & Country was bought by Mr. Hearst in 1925 from the Stuyvesant Co. Last year the magazine acquired a new editor in the person of Henry Adsit Bull, young Harvardman who once bested Edward VIII as Prince of Wales in a pillow fight. A socialite like his managing editor, lank and witty Joseph Bryan III, suave “Harry” Bull appointed an art director of major talent in Louis-Marie Eude, a shy, monocled Frenchman who lost a leg in the War, gives Town & Country’s make-up a unique and endless variety of pictorial effects.

* Lost to Town &-Country was one account: that of Mrs. Norman Thomas, who last month discovered that the magazine was owned by William Randolph Hearst, regretfully withdrew the advertising of her kennels where she raises pedigreed cocker spaniels.