Magazines: The Sunset Way

The magazine’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., is an overgrown Western ranch—all adobe walls and in door barbecue pits. Streams meander over the property; flowers riot in the border beds. The setting could serve as a monument to leisure living, Western style, and that is exactly what it is. In this sun-kissed journalistic keep south of San Francisco, the Western way of life is reverenced as a backyard religion because Sunset Magazine is its priest.

For a publication of such exclusive editorial devotion, Sunset has attracted a considerable if parochial flock. Each month it reaches a paid readership of 733,304, all but a handful in the eight Far Western states—California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Hawaii—that Sunset regards as its parish. It is not interested in the rest of the U.S.; it even discourages outside circulation by charging a premium subscription rate of $1 more a year. The ideal subscriber is perhaps typified by the man who moved his family West from Minnesota and informed the magazine that “Sunset’s got what we came out here for.”

Pomegranate Jam. What Sunset’s got is an idealized picture of the West in which the ugly smell of smog is displaced by the fragrance of burning charcoal, and the passionflower vine blots out the sight of the freeway traffic jam. Sunset’s horizon is limited to its subject matter, and its subject matter is limited to four categories: Western Gardening, Western Homes, Western Food and Western Travel.

In Sunset’s patio culture, the leisure hours stretch out of sight. It is the magazine’s ambition to fill every one of them. The current issue, for example, invites readers to make pomegranate jam, build a five-level child’s bed, hide the garden gas meter with evergreen shrubs and watch the Karok Indians fish at California’s Ishi Pishi Falls. “Everything we publish has to be something on which a reader can take action,” says Sunset Editor Proctor Mellquist. “This gives us a very limited role in the field of urban planning. If our magazine has a social conscience, we don’t play a very active role.”

Sunset was never intended to play social conscience to the West. Until 1928, it was just another provincial literary magazine, plunging downhill in San Francisco. That year a migrant Kansan named Laurence W. Lane bought Sunset. An outdoorsy type himself, Lane took shrewd aim at the tide of sun worshipers flowing West and set out to make Sunset their guidebook.

A Little Silly. In the years since, Sunset has grown into a publishing company that nets a tidy 10%, before taxes, on a gross volume of nearly $10 million. To accommodate varying tastes along the Western seaboard, it publishes in four editions: one each for the Pacific Northwest, the Central Pacific states, the Pacific Southwest and, beginning with the current issue, a fourth directed at desert dwellers. But for all its expansion, Sunset has not really changed. Proprietor Lane, now 73, has given way to his two sons. Melvin, 41, is a vice-president. As publisher, Son Bill, 43, not only looks like his father but runs Sunset just as the old man did.