Esquire ("The Magazine for Men") was established as a quarterly in October 1933. Its sexy cartoons, mannish stories and articles, big pages, colorful men's fashion drawings, found instant favor with a large and admiring public. Its second issue appeared on a monthly basis. Last month Esquire reached a circulation peak, sent some 440,000 copies to readers throughout the land. Last week this big, slick publishing success branched out with a speculative journalistic sideline. The trade was informed, through the medium of a full-page advertisement in Editor & Publisher, that "The Magazine for Men" was entering the newspaper syndicate business.
First Esquire feeler into syndication came two years ago when Publisher David A. Smart sold a fashion feature, produced by Esquire artists, to 100 papers. This year, with newspaper advertising revenues rising, smart Mr. Smart figured that it would be a good time to offer papers some other features as well. Last July Esquire Features, Inc. was quietly formed in Chicago, Esquire's home town. From the Chicago News went able, owlish Howard Denby to be the new syndicate's vice president and editor. Quickly Mr. Denby allied the Esquire syndicate with the News by arranging for it to market two News features, Howard Vincent O'Brien's column All Things Considered, and Naturalist Donald Culross Peattie's A Breath of Outdoors. Counting the old fashion article, the Esquire syndicate offers prospective customers eleven different features, to be purchased singly or in block.
Funny material to be purveyed by the new syndicate had a heavy rural cast. As a possible substitute for the wise saws of the late Humorist Will Rogers, which McNaught Syndicate sold to 500 newspapers, Esquire Features offered a daily 150-word gag from Bob Burns, onetime vaudevillian whose radio hillbilly and cinema humor and music on a home-made "bazooka" were last week estimated in Variety to be earning him $400,000 a year."* Pictorial humor was to be furnished by Esquire Cartoonist Paul Webb's "Mountain Boys," a group of grotesque, bearded, barefooted figures. In the current Esquire one of them is discovered by the side of a balky old car, gawking at an aged woman who is hanging from a nearby tree with a crank in her hand. Caption: "C'mon down an' finish crankin' 'er, Gran'maw—Shucks—I'll be late fer school."
Other features included a Personality Institute for women, a children's cut-out called The World Museum, a serialization of Laurence Greene's historical scrapbook of U. S. Journalism, America Goes to Press (TIME, March 30). Publisher Smart and Editor Denby say they will be in the black if they can sell the Esquire feature list to 35 fair-sized papers. With 100 customers, they say they will see big money.