Magazine for the Lowbrow Book Lover

With absolutely no delusions of intellectual grandeur, Inside Books, the magazine of “print entertainment,” has made its debut.

Its cover boasts a beaming picture of well-known “prime-time author” Joan Collins. Also ballyhooed in cover headlines in fuchsia and red are Judith Krantz, Sidney Sheldon and Bill Cosby. Inside, other featured authors are Leon Uris, George Burns, Barbara Taylor Bradford and Mel Torme.

“The focus is on mass-appeal books,” a publicity release accompanying the November issue of Inside Books declares. This is roughly like announcing that the focus of a shower is to get wet. The release further exults that the magazine of print entertainment “is the People/Rolling Stone/Premiere” of the book world.

Speaking of showers, that was where Howard Barbanel, the 30-year-old editor and publisher of Inside Books, said he was standing when he got the idea for the magazine.

An avid reader with a weakness for science fiction, crime thrillers, historical fiction and biography, Barbanel was at the time publisher of the Miami Jewish Tribune, “a full-color publication that looks like USA Today; in fact in Miami we call it JEW-S-A Today,” Barbanel said.

Suddenly, Barbanel said in a telephone interview from his office in Miami, “it occurred to me, on reading many of the existing book publications, that most of these publications dealt with many serious/intellectual books, a lot of nonfiction books, and really turned their noses up at those books that are entertainment. Yet these are the kind of books that sell in the millions and that people love.

“Take someone like Jackie Collins,” Barbanel said, by way of example. “The woman has sold about 85 million books. If she were a recording artist, she’d be Michael Jackson.”

Along with interviews with “today’s most popular writers,” Inside Books includes about 50 capsule reviews of current releases and charts trends in publishing. Geared to a mainstream audience that reads mainstream books, the publication strives “to take away the ‘no respect’ image” associated with popular reading material, Barbanel said.

“For some reason there is this intellectual snobbery that says that if you’re going to read a Sidney Sheldon book, you should be ashamed of it,” he said. “In fact, we think it’s a positive thing, because the person is in fact reading.”

Barbanel said Inside Books would serve as “the book hit parade.” In selecting the books, “our criteria is not whether it’s good literature, it’s whether it’s worth the $4.95, whether you’re going to enjoy it or be bored to tears. We’re not judging the quality of the English.”

After all, Barbanel went on, “there’s excellent trash, there’s mediocre trash and there’s trash trash. We’d rather feature and recommend excellent trash than feature real garbage.”

The monthly magazine is distributed by Warner Publisher Services and carries a $2.50 cover price.

Three Wasn’t a Crowd

Split personality, Los Angeles magazine style: A minor tempest is wafting about this week over a pseudonymous article in the local monthly’s November issue. Namely, the byline Bunny Mars was attached to an article about three status-conscious Hollywooders doing lunch--novelist Jackie Collins, Los Angeles Herald Examiner Style section editor Richard Rouillard and Mars. Trouble is, Mars is actually the pen name of Rouillard. So, really, there were only two people at the lunch, at least in the corporeal sense.

Los Angeles executive editor Lew Harris said the tongue-in-cheek article was all in good fun.

But Los Angeles Daily News writer Stephen Galloway didn’t see it that way. Galloway wrote an item for the paper’s Hollywood Freeway column on Wednesday exposing the lunch’s inflated number of participants.

“Since when has Los Angeles magazine run cover stories hyping local personalities, written by those very personalities under a pseudonym?” Galloway asked readers.

Harris said Galloway’s ire surprised him when the reporter called to question the use of the fake byline. “I thought I was talking to Mike Wallace,” said Harris, referring to the CBS newsman with a reputation for asking tough questions. “I can’t believe that anybody cares . . . I just don’t know why it matters, to be honest,” Harris added. “I didn’t give it a second thought.”

Harris said the name Bunny Mars is an “in-joke” among many of the city’s writers since it has often been used by Rouillard, including when he wrote for a Los Angeles Times advertising supplement. As a joke, the humor would have been lost if Mars’ true identity had been revealed, he maintained.

Those Good Old Days

A funny thing happened on the way to the second issue of Memories.

First, “the magazine of then and now” got sold by CBS; then it got sold again, this time to the French company Hachette. In the course of negotiations, leveraged buyouts and changes in ownership, the task of putting out the magazine, according to editor Carey Winfrey, was “kind of like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn.” Memories had intended to publish quarterly, but instead managed just two issues this year.

With a cover that implores “Remember the Pueblo!” and reveals “Why Jackie Married Ari,” Memories seems determined to fill the creative nostalgia niche. This is the magazine for people who have not forgotten Caril Ann Fugate or her executed boyfriend Charlie Starkweather, or for people who still think that when Johnny Unitas led the Colts to victory over the Giants 30 years ago, it was, as Memories calls it, “the greatest game.”

Winfrey, however, eschews the nostalgia label. “I’m more comfortable talking about it as a newsmagazine of the recent past,” he said. In describing his latest magazine venture, Winfrey often bills it as “occupying the kind of intellectual no-man’s land between ‘People’ and ‘American Heritage.’ ”

Waxing lofty--because “hey, I’m in charge of lofty here”--Winfrey said it was the goal of Memories to “bring the perspective of 20, 30, 40 years to events that still have meaning to us, with hopes of understanding something about those events.” So many news stories, the former New York Times foreign correspondent went on, “are hustled off the front pages before we really come to terms with what they mean.”

Winfrey, 47, said that when he started working on Memories, “I thought people would have to show their birth certificate at the newsstand when they went to buy it. I thought they would have to be at least 40.”

But demographic research on readers of the first issue showed the average age to be 42, “meaning we had as many under 40 as over 40,” Winfrey said. “The appeal to the younger reader was the surprise.”

Some of the allure may be in painlessly swallowing mini-history lessons, Winfrey said. “There’s Elvis, Jackie, even Alger Hiss,” all featured in this second, “charter” edition of Memories. “Some people may confuse Alger Hiss with Horatio Alger,” Winfrey said, “but here’s a chance for them to straighten out the confusion.”

With a staff of about 10, and what seems to be a permanent parent in the corporate person of Hachette, Winfrey said he doubted that Memories would run out of memories to write about, or that readers would grow tired of tiptoeing through the tulips of recent history.

“In one three-month period, do you know that men walked on the moon for the first time, there was Woodstock, there were the Manson murders and there was Chappaquiddick?” Winfrey asked.

Memories carries a newsstand price of $1.50. A charter subscription deal optimistically offers six issues for “only $7.97.”

Times Staff Writer Garry Abrams also contributed to this column.