The Press: The Newcomers

Peeking out from newsstands across the U.S. this week were 500,000 copies of a gaudy new biweekly magazine called Show Business Illustrated. Its first issue was 156 pages thick, and it bore a family resemblance to a grown-up girlie magazine called Playboy. SBI is the latest publishing venture of Chicago Playboy Hugh M. Hefner, 35, who is also Playboy’s proprietor.

By surrounding the undraped female form with a salable mixture of intellectualia, Hefner pushed Playboy to the top of its field (circ. 1,223,228) in three years. He clearly hopes to do the same with Show Business Illustrated.

Hefner’s new baby is a smorgasbord of the performing arts, with just enough glimpses of feminine breast and thigh to entice readers whose theatrical tastes run no higher. It mostly plows tired ground: feature articles on Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Marlon Brando, plus reviews and listings of coming events that, together with the ads, occupy most of the first 53 pages. SBI’s potential readership, says Associate Publisher A. C. Spectorsky (who holds the same title on Playboy), lies somewhere between magazines that cater to movie addicts and those that appeal to longhaired readers who can follow an operatic score. “They leave hundreds of thousands of people behind,” says Spectorsky. “We want those people.”

SBI is only one in a sudden proliferation of new magazines. Since the first of the year, some 30 newcomers, of all shapes and aims, have risen to take their chances in what is already a well-crowded field. Among the newcomers, born or impending:

∙SHOW : A. & P. Heir Huntington Hartford’s Esquire-sized monthly on the performing arts. Date of its first appearance: Sept. 12. Although Show will aim somewhat higher than SBI, the two magazines must necessarily compete for the same readership. But Hefner airily dismisses Show as a threat. “It’s no serious problem,” says he. “I don’t think Hartford would be too worried if I decided to put out a chain of supermarkets.”

∙USA I: tentative title of a conservative monthly news-cum-history magazine expected to be published this fall by Rodney Campbell, ex-TIME associate editor and son-in-law of the Chicago Tribune’s late Publisher Chesser Campbell.

∙AWARE: a men’s monthly that will offer a new twist, i.e., most of its girls will be modestly dressed. Editor Joe Knefler, longtime Los Angeles newsman, pledges that Aware can be read “somewhere else than the bathroom.” Scheduled publishing date: late September.

∙ATLAS: a sort of highbrow Reader’s Digest with reprints, excerpts and translations from the foreign press, launched last March by Eleanor Davidson Worley, stepdaughter of the late publisher of Illinois and California newspapers, Ira C. Copley, with ABC Newsman Quincy Howe as co-editor.

∙WORLD: a weekly tabloid newsmagazine that will begin publishing Sept. 7. Bank rolled by Willard W. Garvey, a Kansas builder, and edited by former Newsweek Associate Editor and Author (Lament for a Genereation) Ralph de Toledano. World’s, will probably be as conservative as De Toledano’s own.

∙COUNTRY BEAUTIFUL: out last April, a glossy collection of static landscapes and static prose edited by a Roman Catholic priest and financed by a group of Midwest businessmen. Country Beautiful’s goal: to reach “the man who aches to have the cleanness of the fields brought to his city.”

∙THE URBANITE: a bimonthly aimed at the middle-class Negro. A fat market exploited by only two major magazines, Ebony (circ. 630,000) and Jet (360,000). The Urbanite began as a monthly, has since tapered off to bimonthly with a circulation of 30,000.

The survival quotient of these newcomers rests largely on the speciality of their approach. Even so, observers are at a loss to explain the proliferation in terms that make any economic sense. The magazine field is littered with the bones of recent giants: Collier’s (d. 1957 with 4,165,000 circulation), Woman’s Home Companion (4,225,000 when it died by the same stroke of the Crowell-Collier ax), Country Gentleman (which perished in 1955 with 2,566,000 circulation). Only last month, Esquire administered the coup de grâce to its sister publication, Coronet, which had a paid circulation of 3,122,628. Some of the newcomers have begun to die off too: The American Gun perished this summer after three issues; Music, planned as a hard-cover bimonthly covering the field from jazz to opera, still lacks financial support, may die before the overture.