Press: Click

During the past 13 months new pictorial magazines have paraded onto the nation’s newsstands at the rate of one every seven weeks—LIFE, Look, Photo-History, Foto, Pic, Picture Crimes, See, Picture. A ninth, called Click, sidled sleazily into the parade last week with an initial printing of 1,500,000copies which contain no advertising. Noiselessly back of Click is Moses Louis Annenberg, owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the sporting New York Morning Telegraph, the profitable pulp Radio Guide, Screen Guide and Official Detective Stories. Son Walter Annenberg is Click’s director. Best known of its several editors, mostly recruited from other Annenberg publications, are Emile Gauvreau, celebrated as the editor of the notorious but long defunct New York Graphic, and Curtis Mitchell, also editorial director of Screen Guide and Radio Guide.

Excellently printed in rotogravure, Click is likely to give its more roughneck competitors a run for their dimes. An unrestrained display of carnage in the first issue shows a hypnotized man with his lips pierced with pins, kosher beef being slaughtered, a bloody nose-bobbing operation. Most of the rest of the magazine is chiefly suitable for decorating the walls of a college fraternity house—layouts “unmasking” the white slave trade, why Toms peep and at what, finally a section devoted to colored illustrations of off-color jokes and “French art studies.”