Look Out

This week the Nation's newsstands blossomed with 400,000 copies of a picture publication which, in red letters against a blue field, proclaimed itself as Look, The Monthly Picture Magazine. Also on the cover, a convict, Franklin Roosevelt, an actress and an x-ray of a woman's legs fought for attention with a large portrait of Germany's General Goring bottle-feed-ing his lion cub.

This was only an earnest of the 40 pages of eye-popping photographic showmanship in rotogravure through which Look's, lookers could proceed for a dime. Purchasers of Look's first number saw, among other things:

P:A bull apparently (not really) biting a bullfighter.

P:Some scenes in Japanese houses of prostitution.

P:Seven scenes from the famed French newsreel which happened to catch a skidding automobile as it sideswiped & killed a woman.

P:Three pages about Queen Mary's hats, with the late George V remarking, balloon-wise like a comic-strip character, ''Mary, I don't like that hat. I can't see your hair."

P:''When Is a Woman Actually a Woman?" with pictures of recently famed hermaphrodites.

P:Mexican Cinemactress Dolores Del Rio, almost lifesize, in color. P:A "composograph" (frankly doctored picture) of Gypsy Rose Lee. strip teaser, in conversation with Mrs. Harrison Williams, "world's best-dressed woman." Sample imaginary dialog: Williams: "I never wear the same thing twice. And you?" Lee: "I never put off tomorrow what I can put off today."

P:A half-page of undraped, inanimate female clothes models.

Captions under these pictorial features were written with an elementary terseness not unlike the style of the late great Arthur Brisbane (TIME, Jan. 4). Resulting journalistic tone throughout Look was reminiscent of the Hearst Sunday supplements, also of Bernarr Macfadden's dizzy, long-dead tabloid New York Evening Graphic.

Neither Hearst nor Macfadden was responsible for Look, but two young men of Iowa. Aided & abetted by his brother John, 33-year-old Gardner ("Mike") Cowles Jr. of the Des Moines Register and Tribune and Minneapolis Star had long been a publisher who knew how to put pictures together so well that he found it profitable to syndicate his layouts to other publishers. No magazine man. when Mike Cowles was smitten with the idea for Look, he talked it over with his Des Moines friend & neighbor Fred Bohen, president of Better Homes & Gardens and Successful Farming. Fred Bohen was so tickled that he not only gave his blessing but asked if he could buy in.

Meanwhile, TIME, Inc. was launching LIFE from Manhattan as a picture weekly. Conferring with LIFE'S editors, Mike Cowles saw no reason why Look should not find a lower, broader field as a picture monthly. He put up $300.000 of his own and his brother's money to find out if he was right. Friends like Fred Bohen came in for $200,000 more. In spite of his big circulation plans (400.000 first issue). Publisher Cowles announced that, for the present, Look would solicit no advertising. To tradepapers he announced that Look would have "reader interest for yourself, for your wife, for your private secretary, for your office boy." To the public he merely stated that Look was "the most interesting magazine in the world." To insure future lookers, part of the next number's contents were revealed in the first issue: "MYSTERY GIRL. Why can't she be killed?" A brunette in a cat-skin hypnotizing an alligator; "GIRL

LICKS CHAMP," a shot of a husky dancer clamping a leg lock on a wrestler's neck; "SHIP WRECKED!" with a preview of drowned bodies cast up by the sea.

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