Sunday Puncher

In the sideshow world of the Sunday supplements, where pterrifying pterodactyls often rub wings with faded Broadway butterflies, Hearst's giant American Weekly has long been king. But its crown is slipping. After 14 years of trying, This Week magazine has finally passed it in ad revenues. In 1948, according to figures out last week, This Week carried $16,695,628 worth of ads to the Weekly's $16,466,061. (At $24,900 for a four-color page, This Week's ad rate topped all U.S. magazines.*) The Weekly still led in circulation with 9,410,561 copies, but This Week was less than 550,000 behind.

The man who put it there is a lean journalist and ex-pressagent who figured there was more than one way to give a Sunday supplement a Sunday punch. The Weekly had been weaned (by the late Morrill Goddard) on a formula of blood and sexy scandals. This Week's Editor William I. (for Ichabod) Nichols prescribed a blander fare: so-so fiction, fashions, features, cartoons. For roughage he added articles on such subjects as home-buying, legislators' pay, sex education.

Last week Harvardman Bill Nichols changed his formula a bit. He dropped Emily Post (who went over to the American Weekly) for a livelier "Everybody's Etiquette" with such guest lecturers as John Kieran (etiquette for birdwatchers and motorists). And for eager eaters, he signed up Clementine Paddleford, the New York Herald Tribune's food expert.

No Acres of Flesh. As This Week was a supplement in such family journals as the New York Herald Tribune, Cleveland Plain Dealer and 22 others, Nichols thought it would pay "to be decent." Said he: "I'm neither pious nor preachy but my first principle is success and [decency] has paid off in success. You can bore a mass audience to death with acres of flesh. Why did burlesque die?"

An ex-Rhodes Scholar and later an assistant dean at Harvard, Bill Nichols first looked for success as a pressagent for the late Sam Insull. When Insull's utilities empire collapsed in 1932, Nichols switched painlessly to a Harvard publicity job and then to TVA. In 1937 he became editor of Sunset, a Pacific Coast house-&-garden monthly; in 1943 he became editor of This Week, only four years after joining the staff of its founding editor, the late Mrs. William Brown ("Missy") Meloney. Both money-losers were out of the red a year after he took them over.

No Lack of Bosses. Trim and youngish at 43, Editor Nichols makes $35,000 a year, and spends only seven months a year in his Manhattan office. The rest of the time he travels, on expense account, around the U.S. and Europe, picking up ideas. At home, on Park Avenue, he and his Czech-born wife Marie Therese, who speaks seven languages, entertain a babbling stream of foreign authors and artists, who are also tapped for ideas.

Aged (85), ailing Joseph Palmer Knapp and his Publication Corp. (Alco-Gravure, Crowell-Collier Publishing Co.) control This Week. But on editorial affairs, says Nichols, "I have to please 24 bosses"--the editors of the subscribing newspapers (which pay $10 to $15 per 1,000 copies, depending on the size of the supplement, and share its profits, around $3 per 1,000 circulation in 1948). To please them, he shuns anything controversial.

Recently, worried about an article on sex delinquency, he submitted it to the 24 papers in advance. They vetoed the treatment; Nichols had it rewritten. Says he: "I'm not a writer, not a lit'ry fellow. I like to show a profit, and we do."

* The next three: LIFE, American Weekly and the Ladies' Home Journal.

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