Twenty years ago we could have run articles on anything from toy railroads to wild boars to American politics. Now every one of these subjects has a magazine of its own.
—Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham,
quoted in Time
WE HAD JUST FINISHED packaging Knock and Twinge: The Magazine for People with Psychosomatic Car Trouble, and Hepworth could have been forgiven a few moments, even a whole afternoon, of complacency. But that wasn’t Hepworth. Hepworth was looking off into space. He was glaring off into space.
“Its out there,” he was saying. “There’s something else out there. I can feel it. I can almost read it. Fever!: The Newsletter for People Running More than 101° Temperature—no, too ephemeral. Deep End: The Depressive’s Companion. No …”
“Hepworth! Let up!” I expostulated. “You have tested the very limits of the special-audience concept with Illiterate Quarterly. Protective Coating Annual is a hot book, as is Chain Saw Times. Not to mention The Earthworm Breeder, which thrives despite a slump in the earthworm industry itself. Why can’t you take a week or so and just lay back—”
“Layback: A Guide to Unobsessive Living. Unh-uh, Doane, unh-uh.”
“Hepworth!” I cried. “Listen to me just once as a friend.”
“Feed me, Doane!” he snapped. “I don’t employ you for personal counseling, I employ you for concepts. Military wives! What was that one you had for military wives?”
“Hepworth, I … was just jacking around with that one.”
“What was it?”
“All Turn Out: For Those Who’re There When Johnny Comes Marching Ho—”
“So. ‘jacking around.’ You were jacking … around. Doane … Wait a minute. Jacking Around: The Magazine of Idle Raillery. Now at last a regular publication for the man willing to risk his very career for a few easy laughs. Hm … It won’t go.”
Hepworth fell silent. He sifted distractedly through the Knock and Twinge dummy layouts. “Doane, we need something else. Readership does not stand still. No target audience is a sitting duck. Today the need for maximization of advertising efficiency is greater than ever. We want to produce magazines whose ads in the business section of the Times can state proudly, ‘Continuous tracking of both anticipated and actual purchases has demonstrated that the Blacktopper’s Journal reader, alone in the splendid isolation of his own consumer-mind, buys as planned.’ There are widgets out there, Doane. And people who want to sell those widgets. And people who want to read about those widgets. Out there. And we have to put them together.”
I knew. Something hit me. “Hepworth. Widgets?”
“It’s a term, Doane, a figure of speech. I’m just—”
“I know, I know. But just a minute now. What are widgets?”
“Doane, that’s not the point. I’m just … What are widgets?”
“Right back to you.” I moved to the unabridged, flipped right to the w’s, read: “‘A usu. small device, contrivance, or mechanical part (as a fitting or attachment) … ; specif: a small cylindrical container for carrying messages … through pneumatic tubes.’”
It was a definition, at first glance anyway, that didn’t exactly blow horns and whistles. But Hepworth seemed to be off in a pneumatic tube of his own.
“Well …” I said. “Widgetry, the Bible of Cylindrical … Actually, I don’t think there’s much upscale there, Hepworth. Hepworth?”
“‘Usu.’?” he mused.
“It’s short for usually.”
“I didn’t think … anything was short for usually.”
I had never seen him quite like this. “Well, just in dictionaries,” I said.
“Dictionaries! Widgets!” Hepworth suddenly erupted. “Doane! You’ve got me sidetracking! Off-targeting! I don’t have time to brainstorm about dictionaries and widgets! Nobody has that kind of time today! What people have is leisure time for focusing on how they’re going to cope with spending their money. Quality time …”
I don’t mind admitting it, I was chastened. My mind dug in. “Time. That’s something …”
“Doane, we can’t call a magazine Time!”
“No. No. I know. I was just thinking, the whole digest field. How about Digestive Juice: The Essences of the Month’s Digest Magazines!”
“No, Doane. That’s too general-audience. What kind of subculture is that? People who want a diet of boiled-down digests.”
“Well, people on shuttle flights.”
“But what do people on shuttle flights want to buy?”
“A good short martini,” I said, but we both knew I was spinning wheels. We had been through the whole alcohol thing before, getting nowhere with Sloshed: The Magazine of Serious Drinking. At the bar, it had seemed like a zinger. There’d be a guest column headed “The Drunkest I’ve Been,” a regular feature written while blitzed, great drunks in history, hangover remedies, an AA column … Then we realized why nobody had done it before: nobody would run any liquor ads in it. So we changed it to Mellow: The Magazine of a Recreational Pop or Two, and boom, it went. However, the staff never seemed able to get it out on time. In the end, we had to let liquor flow back into the mainstream.
Past history; I couldn’t dwell on that. Hepworth was aching to have something good bounced off him. I scanned the room. Drapes: no. Awards and citations: no. My eyes came to rest on Hepworth himself.
“How about … you, Hepworth? What are you interested in? What would you want to read a magazine of?”
“Me?” His tone was gruff.
“Sure. Who better? What would make you respond to a mailer? What would you find yourself picking up on the stand?”
Hepworth all but smiled. “I …,” he said. “Demographics. Magazine packaging. I would read … a magazine of magazine packaging.”
Hepworth rose, walked to the window, looked out at the Newsweek Building. “And what is more, I would write a one-sentence description of that magazine and sell forty points of it at five thousand dollars a point. I would pull together a year’s worth of tables of contents (with bylines), a logo, an art director, eight contributing editors, and a complete dummy including an emotional service piece, a rate-the-packagers feature, a buzz-of-the-industry items column, a personality profile, and a letter from the publisher. And I would go to direct mail on that sonofagun and it would test out at ten, twelve, fifteen percent: phenomenal. And—”
“I’ve got a title for it!” I cried.
“I don’t want to hear it,” said Hepworth, each word bitten off. I was brought up short. “And I’m going to tell you why,” he went on. “Because we would put that magazine out, Doane, and two hundred thousand people from coast to coast would read it and start packaging magazines. That’s right. Hundreds of thousands of magazines, Doane: teeming, piling up, renewing, scattering blow-in subscription cards, feeding on one another. Have you ever heard, Doane, of the In-House Effect?”
I, of course, had. In a general way. An implosion, I supposed—or an explosion, or both—of the organs of communication. A chain reaction so pervasive, so metastatic, that no lane or avenue in America, business or residential, would be without a floating ad conference. And every chat, set-to, birthday or tender moment along those lanes and avenues would be photographed, laid out, angled and written up, in thumb-through-speed prose, quite specifically for all those people who wanted, and could afford, such products as might be germane to it; and all the staffs of all the publications involved would publish smaller inside publications for and about themselves. There would be no Life magazine, as we knew it or even as we know it, and yet also no form of non-magazine-related life.
“There is, to be sure, a magazine-packaging boom,” I heard Hepworth saying. “But that is one boom that must not have its own magazine. Because there is something else, Doane—there may not be a boom in it, but it’s called professional responsibility.”
Hepworth, of course, was right. There are stories that cannot be written. Confidences that cannot be shared. Bombs that cannot be dropped. Markets that cannot be zeroed in on. I would go through fire for that man.