Images Before Facebook

 

 

LOOK 1937-1971

 

 

 

 

By Megan McKinney

 

What did Americans do in their leisure time before Facebook? Before television?

 

LIFE 1936-1972

 

We read. If not books, we read magazines. One didn’t even need to read to enjoy the great picture magazines, LIFE and LOOK. Although various long-gone magazines pop up again from time to time, they usually don’t last. Others may return in a form we don’t recognize.

 

 

In 1936, publisher Henry Luce spent $92,000 to buy a little humor publication that carried the title LIFE simply to acquire the name. He and Time Inc. co-founder Briton Hadden had begun publishing Time magazine in 1923, and Mr. Luce followed  with Fortune in 1930. The third venture, LIFE, created after the death of Mr. Hadden, was designed as the definitive photo magazine in the United States, giving as much space and importance to images as to words. Above is LIFE‘s first cover. However, the Luce  photos would become more appealing as time went on.

 

This was more  like it.

 

 

LOOK was founded by a pair of Iowa brothers, Gardner “Mike” Cowles Jr. and John Cowles, who published The Des Moines Register and The Des Moines Tribune. When LOOK‘s first issue went on sale in early 1937, three months after LIFE magazine’s debut, it sold 705,000 copies. Joining Santa on the cover of an early issue was the era’s hugely successful Hollywood child star Shirley Temple.

 

  

One of the nation’s most popular magazines, THE SATURDAY EVENING POST, was published weekly from 1897 until 1963. Americans were shocked when the POST folded. However, as with many of the great old standards, its status continues to vary.  Collier’s, a weekly from 1888 to 1957, was a bit of a SATURDAY EVENING POST copycat — but vanished even earlier although it popped back up briefly in 2012.

 

 

Yes, LIFE, LOOK and THE SATURDAY EVENING POST were the magazines over which children fought with their siblings. “Dibs on seeing LIFE first.”  But December 1953 brought PLAYBOY, billed as ENTERTAINMENT FOR MEN, which outdid them all.

 

 

The above is not a typical Esquire cover—and the subject was not Marilyn Monroe, which at the time everyone thought, but an Italian film actress of the era, Virna Lisi. For ninety-odd years, the publication’s front has invariably been covered with a headshot of a man—often George Clooney in  Esquire’s  recent years.

 

 

 

Interestingly, a poll of midcentury New York magazine professionals would surely reveal this periodical as the industry’s favorite. Executives from other magazines could easily and accurately rattle off names of Esquire  Founders: Chicago’s David and  Alfred Smart—Smart Museum, anyone? Esquire Editors: initially Arnold Gingrich and during the publication’s glorious 1960’s, the great Harold Hayes; Esquire Writers: Ernest Hemimgway, John Dos Passos and on and on throughout the years since its Chicago founding in 1933.

 

Esquire’s Founding Editor Arnold Gingrich

 

Harold Hayes, the great Esquire Editor of the 1960’s

 

 

The above is typical of the ninety-two covers graphic designer George Lois created for Esquire.

 

 

The George Lois covers were so successful, they earned a show of their own at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

 

 

In an era when magazines were folding, George was a new one, which caught public attention in 1995 when it was founded by John F. Kennedy, Jr. and a colleague, Michael J. Berman. The Inaugural Issue featured a Herb Ritts cover photo of Cindy Crawford dressed as George Washington, with a cover line promising an interview of George Wallace by young Kennedy inside. Not Just Politics as Usual was the subtitle.  JFK Jr died in 1999 and George ceased publication two years later following publication of fifty-seven issues (with sixty-one covers).

 

 

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Author photo: Robert F. Carl