The Press: Culture on the Horizon

By the usual definition, the nation’s newest magazine is no magazine at all. It has a hard vermilion cover, 48 color pictures, and not even a breath of an ad. Setting for itself the boundless task of scanning all the arts, book-priced ($3.95 in bookstores), Horizon is lavish, brash, wide-ranging.

Lighting up the first Horizon’s 152 pages this week are captious musical memories of Composer Igor Stravinsky, an exuberant, perkily illustrated survey of pioneer ballooning, and 16 pages of photographs suggesting the glory of the earth’s creation. Energetically but less successfully, Horizon embraces such -ho-hum items as a spoof on wine snobbery, a mystique-ridden study of why men climb mountains. It also carries a long-winded sneer at the Beat Generation, including abstract expressionist painters. But in another article it acknowledges that Abstract Painter Willem de Kooning is among the nation’s bestsellers.

The magazine’s jaunty chiefs—Editor Joseph J. Thorndike Jr. and Publisher James Parton—see no clouds on their

Horizon. Says Managing Editor William Harlan Hale, Yaleman, biographer of Horace Greeley, onetime (1934-35) FORTUNE writer: “There appears to be a greater and greater inclination on the part of the public to sample the fruits of civilization. Other magazines fulfill bits and pieces of this hunger, but none devotes itself entirely to the whole vast need.” Catering to U.S. cultural hunger comes easily to Horizon. Its parent is the bustling American Heritage Publishing Co. (TIME, Feb. 17), which overhauled the little-known historical quarterly, American Heritage, in 1954. saw it soar as a bright new bimonthly to a circulation of more than 300,000. Unlike Heritage, which was begun on an initial investment of $65,000, Horizon blossomed forth after a ripe overture of expensive nourishes and drum pounding.

So far, Horizon’s backers, using Heritage profits, have spent more than $370,000 in promotion, mailed more than 3,000,000 brochures to English teachers, art-book buyers, charge-account customers at quality department stores, subscribers to the Book-of-the-Month Club, Heritage, the Saturday Review and Harper’s, and a list broker’s miscellaneous collection of 500,000 “cultured individuals.” The result: before publication, Horizon said it had 145,000 takers (for a press run of 225,000 copies) at $15 for the year’s six issues, $3 less than the regular subscription price. Horizon estimates its break-even point at 110,000 subscribers.