The Press: Picture Monthlies

¶The April issue of Picture, due on newsstands last week, did not appear. Of the Comus’ crew of monthly picture magazines which have appeared in the last two years, it was the first important one to suspend publication. Picture, brought out in December (TIME, Dec. 27), was rather effectively elbowed out of the way early in January by lowbrowed Click. Now Picture Publisher J. Stirling Getchell, one of the first to be bitten by the picture magazine bug, can again concentrate full efforts on his big advertising agency.

¶Focus Editor Leslie T. White managed last week to put his brand-new monthly picture magazine in the news by getting himself indicted for criminal libel by a Texas grand jury. Once one of California’s best and most disillusioned detectives, Editor White wrote a modest best seller (Me, Detective) in 1936. In Focus, promoted through stocksubscriptions, he began a pictorial crusade against national evils, for his first picked San Antonio’s pecan-shelling industry.

When first copies of Focus arrived in San Antonio, pecan shellers were on strike, the city in an uproar (TIME, Feb. 28). In an hour 2,700 copies of the 10¢ Focus were snapped up. San Antonio’s gasping public tried not to believe Leslie White’s timely charge that “it is possible for a four-plus syphilitic to obtain a health card from the San Antonio health department for 50¢,” to go to work shelling pecans for the nation to eat. Shortly Editor White was indicted for criminal libel. Certain of his facts, he was delighted, but harassed Mayor Charles Kennon Quin of San Antonio fulminated: “I always make it a rule not to engage in a fumigation contest with a skunk.”