New Entry in Women’s Market

The supermarket checkout line--a gantlet of magazines touting recipes, beauty tips and home-sewing, not to mention tabloids shrieking about UFOs, no-pain diets and celebrities--is about to get a new entry: First for Women. And for a while at least, its publisher predicts the monthly magazine will be inescapable.

There’s a reason for that: The $15 million Henrich Bauer North America Inc. says it will spend on network television advertising to launch First, which debuts Monday on newsstands as well as in most supermarkets. Bauer boasts that “no publisher has ever put this great an advertising effort behind the launch of a magazine before.” Moreover, Bauer, based in West Germany, is selling the 8 million copies of the premiere March issue for 25 cents, a come-on that’s 75 cents off the regular price.

A Familiar Mix

What readers will get for their quarter is the familiar mix of service articles available in many general interest women’s magazines. The cover of First’s 150-page first issue headlines such staples as “How to turn your husband into your fantasy lover,” and “Looking younger! Not just a beauty routine--a way of life!” For the reality-oriented, the magazine also has cover teasers for a “complete chicken cookbook” and tips on organizing closets.

Inside, the magazine is awash with enough personal care, fashion and home-decor projects to keep anyone busy for a lifetime. There’s a how-to article to help bleached blonds revert to their natural hair color, a 10-minute daily exercise routine for toning legs, a microwave diet and advice on filing tax returns. There are also directions for knitting three styles of sweaters, directions for making a “Victorian-inspired” afghan, and at least 28 recipes, not counting the ones in the food ads. In their spare time, readers can take a personality quiz to find out: “Is it love or lust?”

The magazine’s advertising director, Todd Selbert, admits there are no innovations in the magazine. “We haven’t discovered anything new under the sun in terms of women’s service,” he said in a telephone interview from New York.

The difference, he said, is all in the packaging. First will be “much less cluttered” than its competitors, Selbert said, noting that the magazine’s articles are mainly contained within a page or are continued on following pages, not “jumped” to the back of the book. Furthermore, the magazine will carry no scent strips, subscription cards and no “crazy” ad sizes that drive readers to distraction, he added.

But the centerpiece of First’s appeal, the ad director said, is that the magazine will contain less advertising than its rivals. About a third of its pages will be devoted to ads, compared with about half in comparable magazines, Selbert explained. The reduction in ad content reduces overall clutter, thus enhancing both advertising and editorial content, he said.

First’s launch is a direct assault on the so-called “Seven Sisters” of women’s magazines--Better Homes & Gardens, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Redbook and Woman’s Day.

But First isn’t trying to become the eighth sister because the market is lucrative. Although the magazines have a combined monthly circulation of more than 39 million, First is trumpeting that all seven have taken circulation dives in the past decade, about 19% overall.

Selbert argued that “women are kind of fed up with” the established magazines, noting that First is tailored to the results gleaned from more than 100 “focus groups”--consumers who critiqued two prototypes of the magazine as well as its competitors.

First’s strategy is being met with doubts. The trade publication MagazineWeek reports that competition for ad revenue among the seven sisters already is furious and can only sharpen with the entry of an eighth.

Even First’s Selbert conceded that the large start-up costs won’t be recouped for several years. Beyond the money earmarked for television advertising, he declined to say how much that is, noting only that the amount would “obviously qualify for the Guinness Book of World Records.”

Enclitic on the Rise

Since 1976 a small Los Angeles-based magazine called Enclitic, which bills itself as a quarterly, has managed to produce a total of 21 issues. For the first 20 issues the magazine, founded as a journal of cultural criticism, was printed in a small format about the size of a hardcover book. There were years when the magazine sold only a couple of thousand copies, editor John O’Kane says.

But lately things have been looking up, thanks largely to a larger format that is both more visible on newsstands and easier to read, O’Kane said, noting that about 8,000 copies of the latest issue have been distributed.

Enclitic, named for a grammatical term referring to the proper stress on words, is a sometimes eccentric blend of interviews, poetry, essays and fiction. The long, wide-ranging interviews with cultural and literary rebels--such as Paul Krassner, publisher of the Realist magazine--tend to be Enclitic’s centerpieces. A sample from the Krassner interview: “Yoko Ono once gave me a clock, an alarm clock which had no numbers or hands on it but just a sky with clouds in it. But it was still functional and so I would wind it up and set the alarm for I didn’t know what time, and that was a great device in getting you to pay attention. . . .”

But topics range from South African politics to an essay by O’Kane, titled “The Metaphysics of Baseball: Dodgers ’88.”

As in the past, the latest issue contains work by local writers who have made names for themselves--Richard Meltzer, perhaps best known for his 1988 book, “LA Is the Capital of Kansas,” and Kate Braverman, a poet and author of two novels, including “Palm Latitudes” published last year.

Subscriptions are $16 and available by writing the magazine at P.O. Box 36098, Miracle Mile Station, Los Angeles, 90036-0098.

Life in February

Life magazine takes a peek at the future in its February issue and it’s not as bad as you might think. In a thoughtful 30-page section that tries to get a jump on the next millennium, the magazine predicts--perhaps wishfully--that TV networks will become extinct by the year 2000, as will the penny, canned food, file cabinets, baldness, eyeglasses, dentists and grocery clerks. People will live longer and look younger, the magazine forecasts, “so that by 2040 a person of 65 may be physically comparable to a 45-year-old of today.”

There is a downside, however. Citing a United Nations study, the magazine reports that 65 countries, mostly in Africa and South Asia, will be unable to feed themselves and that ecological and environmental problems will continue, almost certainly in surprising and perhaps deadly forms. The magazine also says that by 2025 more than 20 countries will have nuclear arms and the capability to launch them. In the future, too, war zones will become so horrible that robots will be used for many battlefield tasks.

Warhol on the Cover

While he was alive, Andy Warhol never made the cover of Interview magazine--which he used to transform tape-recorded cafe chatter into a sort of cinema verite of print. But 20 years after he founded the magazine and two years after his death, the Pop artist, movie maker and student of fame is finally right out front in the February issue. The 1979 Polaroid self-portrait shows an enigmatic, shadowy face with two careful pinpoints of light in the artist’s eyes. The reason for the cover: A feature on Warhol’s behind-the-scenes life when he was building a reputation that would last for more than 15 minutes. The article is timed for a retrospective of Warhol’s work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.