Look (American magazine)

Not to be confused with Look (UK magazine).

Look

Actress Anne Gwynne, a 1939–40 model for Catalina Swimwear, was featured on the January 30, 1940 cover of Look.
Frequency	Bi-weekly
First issue	February 1937 (1937-February)
Final issue	October 19, 1971
Company	Cowles Media
Country	United States
Based in	Des Moines, Iowa
Language	English
ISSN	0024-6336

Look was a bi-weekly, general-interest magazine published in Des Moines, Iowa, from 1937 to 1971, with more of an emphasis on photographs than articles. A large-size magazine of 11 by 14 inches, it was generally considered a competitor to Life magazine, which began publication months earlier and ended in 1972.

It is known for helping launch the career of film director Stanley Kubrick, who was a staff photographer.

Origin

Gardner "Mike" Cowles, Jr. (1903–1985), the magazine's co-founder (with his brother John) and first editor, was executive editor of The Des Moines Register and The Des Moines Tribune. When the first issue went on sale in early 1937, it sold 705,000 copies.

Although planned to begin with the January 1937 issue, the actual first issue of Look to be distributed was the February 1937 issue, numbered as Volume 1, Number 2. It was published monthly for five issues (February–May 1937), then switched to bi-weekly starting with the May 11, 1937 issue. Page numbering on early issue counted the front cover as page one. Early issues, subtitled Monthly Picture Magazine, carried no advertising.

The unusual format of the early issues featured layouts of photos with long captions or very short articles. The magazine's backers described it as "an experiment based on the tremendous unfilled demand for extraordinary news and feature pictures". It was aimed at a broader readership than Life, promising trade papers that Look would have "reader interest for yourself, for your wife, for your private secretary, for your office boy".

Circulation peak

Look Building on Madison Avenue in New York

Within weeks, more than a million copies were bought of each issue, and it became a bi-weekly. By 1948 it sold 2.9 million copies per issue. Circulation reached 3.7 million in 1954, and peaked at 7.75 million in 1969. Its advertising revenue peaked in 1966 at $80 million. Of the leading general interest large-format magazines, Look had a circulation second only to Life and ahead of The Saturday Evening Post, which closed in 1969, and Collier's, which folded in 1956.

Look was published under various company names: Look, Inc. (1937–45), Cowles Magazines (1946–65), and Cowles Communications, Inc. (1965–71). Its New York editorial offices were located in the architecturally distinctive 488 Madison Avenue, dubbed the "Look Building", now on the National Register of Historic Places.

Beginning in 1963, Norman Rockwell, after closing his career with the Saturday Evening Post, began making illustrations for Look.

KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov, regarding the October 1967 Russia Today issue, said: "From the first page to the last page, it was a package of lies: propaganda cliché[s] which were presented to American readers as opinions and deductions of American journalists. Nothing could be [further] from [the] truth." He goes on to explain exactly how the Look reporters were compromised.

Look ceased publication with its issue of October 19, 1971, the victim of a $5 million loss in revenues in 1970 (with television cutting deeply into its advertising revenues), a slack economy and rising postal rates. Circulation was at 6.5 million when it closed.

Aftermath

Hachette Filipacchi Médias brought back Look, The Picture Newsmagazine in February 1979 as a bi-weekly in a slightly smaller size. It lasted only a year. Subscribers received copies of Esquire magazine to fulfill their terms.

The Look Magazine Photograph Collection was donated to the Library of Congress and contains approximately five million items.

After the closure, six Look employees created a fulfillment house using the computer system newly developed by the magazine's circulation department. The company, CDS Global, is now an international provider of customer relationship services.

Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick was a staff photographer for Look before starting his feature film career. Of the more than 300 assignments Kubrick did for Look from 1946 to 1951, more than 100 are in the Library of Congress collection. All Look jobs with which he was associated have been cataloged with descriptions focusing on the images that were printed. Other related Kubrick material is located at the Museum of the City of New York.

James Karales

James Karales was a photographer for Look from 1960 to 1971. Covering the Civil Rights Movement throughout its duration, he took many memorable photographs, including the iconic photograph of the Selma to Montgomery march showing people proudly marching along the highway under a cloudy turbulent sky.

Cultural references

• The magazine is mentioned in numerous films, including The Shawshank Redemption (1994), A Christmas Story, Crazy in Alabama, An Affair to Remember, and The Hoax.
• On The Simpsons episode "Bart on the Road", a marquee in Branson, Missouri advertises an Andy Williams show with a quote from Look magazine ("Wow! He's still got it!"), although Look magazine had folded 25 years earlier.
• An episode of I Love Lucy had a Look photographer coming to Lucy and Ricky's apartment only to have the shoot spoiled by Lucy.
• In Season One Episode Five of Mad Men, on a comment about Don Draper's secretary Peggy Olson by his wife, Betty Draper he remarks, "Did you read some terrible article in Look Magazine that I should know about?".
• The magazine is a major plot point in the 1953 film I Love Melvin starring Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds.
• The magazine is given a passing reference in the opening pages of Philip Roth's 1969 novel Portnoy's Complaint. The narrator uses it to illustrate his father's distasteful "reading" habits.
• In the 1983 film A Christmas Story, Ralphie places his copy of Boys' Life inside his mother's copy of Look Magazine so she will see the advertisement for a Red Ryder BB gun and then places the magazine on his mother's pillow.
• The 1937 cartoon Speaking of the Weather depicts magazines that come to life. In one scene, a character peeks through Look (making a gag out of the title).

See also

• List of defunct American periodicals

Further reading

• Cowles, Gardner. Mike Looks Back: The Memoirs of Gardner Cowles, Founder of Look Magazine. New York: G. Cowles, 1985.

External links

• Look magazine (Memory): from American Treasures of the Library of Congress.
• Cowles Family Publishing Legacy