6 - Leafing Men and Ladies: Fan Magazines and Reading Strategies

Summary

Between the 1920s and the 1950s, the heyday of fan magazines, Introduction to Advertising was published in several editions in the United States. Authored by advertising executives and academics, this industry handbook included advice on the distribution of advertisements and editorial material in magazines. It was recommended that advertisers exploit readers’ desire to finish articles. These should terminate among advertisements ‘to increase the probability of the advertisement's being read’ (Brewster, Palmer and Ingraham 1947, 85). This was considered so commonplace a practice that ‘every magazine reader has doubtless learned from his [sic] own experience that it accomplishes this result very effectively’ (85). We cannot know whether such reading strategies were followed by those perusing fan magazines. However, analysis of the interaction of advertisements and editorial material in fan magazines is particularly important because these elements are especially entwined. As well as using stars to advertise films, these publications promoted items endorsed by stars, which readers could buy to emulate them. Stars themselves are products, with editorial material not only sating readers’ desire for information about stars’ lives but contributing to their image. Sumiko Higashi's Stars, Fans, and Consumption in the 1950s: Reading Photoplay (2014) provides some useful comment on the relationship between advertisements and editorial material in the ubiquitous US fan magazine. Since structure has rarely been addressed in relation to fan magazines, and there is criticism that scholarship has unjustly focused on Photoplay due to its availability (Petersen 13 November 2013, n.p.), this chapter considers the contents and structure of Photoplay alongside four other magazine titles. In addition to the August 1955 issue of the little-known Filmalaya, I explore the 3 September 1955 issues of the British weeklies Picturegoer and Picture Show and September 1955 UK and US versions of the monthly Photoplay.

Concern with the interplay of advertisements and editorial material has more often been discussed by scholars addressing women's magazines. Since, as Sally Stein comments, women's magazines are ‘underwritten by advertisers’ (1985, 9), academic work focuses on the address to the increasingly powerful female consumer. Stein's ‘The Graphic Ordering of Desire: Modernization of a Middle-Class Magazine 1914–1939’ (1985) tackles the structural relation of advertisements to other features in the US women's magazine Ladies Home Journal at five-year intervals.