Happy Holiday

A year ago Curtis Publishing Co. rushed the first big postwar magazine to market, then stepped back to await the applause. It was far from deafening. Well heralded Holiday hit the newsstands with a thud, and at 50-c- a copy most people just let it lie. It was hard to tell the stories from the ads, and the editors themselves hadn't decided whether they were describing a Roman holiday or a beggar's.

But last week Curtis announced that the magazine had hit its stride. Its new issue (March) was something to see, and the writing was no longer hey-look. It offered a huge (39-page) and handsome Mexican takeout, a cool appraisal of Atlantic City, an engaging Swiss essay, written and illustrated by Ludwig Bemelmans. Sales had bounced over 605,000, the biggest circulation a 50-c- magazine had ever reached in one year. Curtis was looking forward to the day when Holiday would even make money.

In the highly competitive magazine business, where one false step can be fatal, it was a brilliant transformation. Three men had sweated it out. One was Editor Ted Patrick, the dapper, greying adman who had dropped everything at Curtis' unborn, LIFElike "Magazine X" to go to Holiday's rescue (TIME, July 8). One was British-born Art Editor James Yates, who had gone to "X" after restyling the Satevepost during the war. The third was wise and wiry Ik (pronounced Ike) Shuman, who left a top job at the New Yorker four years ago to work first as "magazine consultant" to Marshall Field, then for Esquire's Dave Smart.

Says Patrick: "We had to get away from the travel-guide idea. We wanted an adult magazine that would tell people more about the world so they could act intelligently when and if they set out to see it. We wanted a book that would inform them in a big, broad way." They had to ditch most of the excursion articles their predecessors had laid away, and convince authors that they didn't have to puff the places they wrote about.

They bluffed their way through their first "big, broad" portfolio pieces (New Mexico, Florida); the Mexican roundup in this issue, and next month's on Bermuda, are thoroughgoing, eyewitness staff jobs.

From here on, says Patrick, Holiday will travel first class, pay its authors well. Its first dreamboat assignment recently went to Funnyman S. J. Perelman (Keep It Crisp), now en route to Bali with Artist Albert Hirschfeld. Title of their series: Westward Ha! or, Around the World in Eighty Cliches.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.