The Press: Magazine for Special Men

“A new type of magazine .[which] will either elate the top 100,000 thinking men in this country, or be a miserable flop.” This frank and frankly snobbish advertising heralded the advent of a new $2-a-copy quarterly, Gentry, which appeared last week, sponsored by Manhattan’s Reporter Publications. The new magazine did not quite live up to its billing (“There is nothing in the world like it”). It looked rather like a masculine version of Fleur Cowles’s late, ill-starred Flair. It looked even more like the fancy and expensive ($3 a copy) trade quarterly, American Fabrics, also published by Reporter Publications. Gentry abounded in detachable inserts (an architect’s plans for a Finnish steam bath, a 16-page portfolio of engravings of ducks) and three-color textile ads illustrated by swatches of materials (Shetland woolens, fine corduroys, cotton shirtings, etc.). Gentry extended the sample theme to its articles, in one of which a bag of marjoram was glued to a piece about the herb. In later issues, Gentry’s editors plan to paste a trout fly in a fishing article, a leaf of fine Jamaica tobacco in a piece on smoking.

Pictorially, the first issue was impressive (e.g., four full-page color reproductions of old automobiles, beautifully reproduced Japanese prints). But most of the articles were cluttered up with swatches of pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness (e.g., a, 14-page layout entitled “What Does It Mean to Be a Man?” containing everything from Mohammed’s Testament to his son-in-law to a three-layer diagram of man’s body, nervous system and skeleton).

Gentry’s founders are 46-year-old Publisher William C. Segal and 48-year-old Executive Editor Sam Cook Singer, who first met each other in high school in The Bronx, and have worked together for eight years putting out men’s clothing trade publications (American Fabrics, Men’s Reporter, Canadian Reporter, Gold Book Directory”). They claim a solid year’s booking of advertising for Gentry, and 14,000 charter subscriptions. Flair may well have failed because it aimed at no particular reader. Singer thinks he has drawn a bead on Gentry’s: a sort of soth Century Renaissance man—well-educated, well-heeled, with leisure to dabble in the arts, science, sports, philosophy or his own Finnish bath.