The Press: Sunset Gold

Last week on San Francisco’s famed Embarcadero were unloaded the biggest and best magazine rotary presses ever to appear on the West Coast. When assembled in the prospective Palo Alto plant of Sunset, the Pacific Monthly, the battery will consist of two 64-page, two-color Cottrell presses and two Cottrell-McKee multicolor presses for four-color work, along with electrotyping, drying and binding equipment. Total cost: $250,000.*All of this will start rolling next month to print a magazine which has had to peg its circulation at around 200,000 since 1930 because there were not enough big presses west of the Rockies to print any more copies.

Sunset’s folksy Publisher Lawrence William (“Larry”) Lane is now guaranteeing 225,000 a month for 1939, claims a bigger circulation than any other Pacific Coast magazine ever achieved.

Started in 1898 by Southern Pacific Co., then engaged in colonizing and propagandizing its western empire, Sunset was circulated mostly in the East and widely advertised by Indian posters captioned: ”You can see Indians like this in the Far West and read about them in Sunset Magazine.” In 1914 Southern Pacific sold the magazine to employes. They set out to publish a thick “Atlantic Monthly of the West.” Circulation drooped, dropped.

Larry Lane visited the Coast as adman for Better Homes and Gardens. He was born in Horton, Kans., had jogged around Minnesota with a horse and buggy selling Keen Kutter knives, got his learning at Drake University. Like many another Coast visitor, Larry Lane saw at once how vastly Far Western modes of living, eating, fun-making differed from those of the rest of the U. S. When he bought Sunset (largely for its established name) in 1928, he determined to publish a magazine capitalizing on the Far West’s insularity. His first move was to slash the price from 25¢ to 10¢ a copy. Second was to junk all purely literary features. He then divided the magazine into four general departments: Western Gardening, Western Homes, Western Foods (a Sunset All-Western Thanksgiving dinner included chilled papaya nectar, tortilla chips, spiced loquats and steamed persimmon pudding), and Western Travel.

Sunset pays almost no attention to such overexploited aspects of Western life as Hollywood, pension plans and college football, but goes in big for new kinds of auto trailers, mountain cabins, patios. It never touches on controversial matters like politics or labor trouble. It plugs the “how-to-do-it” angle, with simple diagrams showing how to design anything from a homespun lampshade to a barbecue oven. Its unvarying, chirpy cheerfulness grates on Eastern nerves, but is fully justified by results to date. Profits for 1938 will be approximately $25,000 as compared with a loss of $71,822 during Lane’s first year.

Blue-eyed, ruddy and broad of gait, Publisher Lane likes to loll around his new ranch (Quail Hollow) near Santa Cruz in a silk shirt and sombrero. His wife is president of the Palo Alto Garden Club. He has one rule for successful publishing: “Never miss an issue.”

To get out the revivified Sunset each month, Publisher Lane relies on slender, studious, Yankee-blooded William Ichabod Nichols. An ex-Rhodes scholar, he became an assistant Harvard dean (of freshmen) at the age of 22, and once helped elect a mayor of Cambridge, Mass. Now, at 33, Editor Nichols is a confirmed Far Westerner, likes nothing better than to print pictures of cacti and donkeys in the columns of reader-letters which he compiles every month under the heading “Sunset Gold.” He gets some fairly flavorsome inquiries from his readership. Samples: “Dear Mr. Editor, I am troubled with buzzards. How can I shoo them out of my eucalyptus grove?”

“Are there any abandoned lighthouses for sale in Oregon?”

“Dear Sir, How does one barbecue an entire pig?”

*The equipment was bought by Coast Printing Corp., a recently organized firm which will also do other magazine work while sharing Sunset’s new quarters.