The Press: Scribner's to the Smoking Room

David A. Smart is a onetime stenographer who in 1937 exulted: "Why didn't somebody tell me about this publishing game before? It's a cinch." Dave Smart had twice hit the jackpot: with Apparel Arts, a men's fashion magazine which began paying off soon after he started it in 1931, and Esquire, which, started in 1933, became a hit overnight. Esquire's Editor Arnold Gingrich packed it full of cheaply bought stories by big-name authors and flashy risque color cartoons, made it the greatest smoking-room magazine of all time. Circulation zoomed until it hit 625,000 in December 1937, and that issue carried...

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