The Press: Smarter Smart Set

In its 30 years of monthly publication, Smart Set has successively appeared as:

1) A magazine of dainty love tales, elaborate stories of the Gibson Girl era.

2) A collection of perfumed pornography.

3) The first joint eruption of Henry Louis Mencken and George Jean Nathan.

4) A frankly salacious offering of “confessions” of youthful emotional crises.

5) Currently, a fairly commonplace, fairly attractive poť-pourri of light fiction and articles for consumption by young women. The July issue is Smart Set’s final one in the latter form.

Last week Editor-elect Arthur H. Samuels journeyed to California to hear Publisher William Randolph Hearst’s wishes for Smart Set’s next transformation. Publisher Hearst has bought back Smart Set after a two-year interim in which James R. Quirk, owner of successful Photoplay, failed to popularize it as “the young women’s magazine.” From 1924 to 1928 Mr. Hearst put Smart Set through its “confession” phase. Now he thinks it might be made into a sophisticated smart-chart for women in and about Manhattan.

Presumably Editor Samuels was told to apply what tricks he may have learned while watching, as Publisher Raoul H. Fleichmann’s overseer, the clever editors of the New Yorker, to make Smart Sef compete with that weekly, as well as with Conde Nast’s lily-gilding Vanity Fair.*

First coup credited to Hearst strategy: capture of Peter Arno, most famed main drawing card among New Yorker’s artists.

For more than a decade after it was founded in 1900, Smart Set was a parlor table favorite with its familiar cover design of a man and woman coyly greeting each other while a cupid and black devil played havoc with their hearts. Its most startling upheaval occurred in 1914, after an enforced change of owners. Eltinge F. Warner, publisher of Field & Stream was made publisher and Mencken & Nathan found themselves editors. Under that regime many a now-famed author (examples: James Joyce, Lord Dunsany) was given his first U. S. audience. Others who were early recognized, if not actually discovered by Mencken & Nathan’s Smart Set: Ruth Suckow, Sherwood Anderson. Ben Hecht, Eugene Gladstone O’Neill, Thyra Samter Winslow, Barry Benefield. Christopher Darlington Morley.

*0ther fronts on which Publisher Hearst is challenging Publisher Nast: Harper’s Bazaar . Vogue, Home & Field v. House & Garden.