What's New?

Two magazines make their debuts this week, one an old trouper in a gaudy new dress, the other a flossy stranger dedicated to filling a self-discovered void.

> LIKE NO MAGAZINE YOU HAVE EVER READ BEFORE, enthused the Saturday Evening Post in full-page ads introducing the face lifting that was prescribed to cure its ten-year slump in ad linage. Most readers are not likely to be so certain: the new magazine reads like the old Post. The fiction is the same tug-at-the-heartstrings stuff. Nonfiction will be "weeks, months, even years ahead of press coverage," says the Post; yet the new issue explores mainly old press favorites: ex-Yankee Manager Casey Stengel, Broadway Producer David Merrick, the "young widow." the "new" Japan. Only the touted "Revolution by Design" is clearly different. Twenty-two different type sizes and faces greet the reader from the table of contents page. Photos are sometimes surprisingly abstract. Despite the new look (and a nickel price rise to 20-c-), pledges the Post, it will be the same "well-known, well-loved voice.''

>"The magazine industry is not flourishing," says A. & P. Heir Huntington Hartford in an introductory note to his new monthly, Show. "Why, then, a new publication at such a time?" Because, says Hartford, there was "no all-embracing publication of culture and the arts," and Show "will fill this void," at $1 per issue. If there was indeed such a void, it is still yawning. Show's first issue offers the less than startling news that lower production costs could cure Broadway's ills and that ABC-Television is run by men with the creative imagination of soap salesmen; it profiles such familiar figures as Artur Rubinstein and Orson Welles; and it reintroduces that familiar technique in newsgathering--the taped interview. Show says it seeks "a limited quality audience," and the preponderance of ads from Manhattan stores and restaurants indicates that the audience may be limited indeed.

Both the Post and Show present a section spotlighting rising young personalities. The Post calls it "People on the Way Up," Show simply "On the Way Up." Whether the titles will become prophetic for either magazine remains in doubt.

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