The Span of LIFE

The aim was high: "To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events." In modern journalism there had been many attempts to hit this target; most of the tries (like Midweek Pictorial) had been faltering. The editors, gathered in a 51st-floor room in Manhattan, wanted a picture magazine that could keep pace with, and even accelerate, the swift advance of camera and printing techniques. They put out two trial issues (called Dummy and Rehearsal) and were still looking about for a better name than Show-Book. Shortly before their first deadline they found it, bought (for $92,000) the title of an expiring humorous magazine. On Nov. 23, 1936, ten years ago this week, the new LIFE was born.

Inside its first cover (Montana's Fort Peck dam, by Margaret Bourke-White), the 225,000 charter subscribers and 200,000 newsstand buyers found picture stories of King Edward VIII, the black widow spider, Robert Taylor, and Spain in civil war.

More to Come. This week, LIFE expected to sell over 5,350,000 copies--and the saturation point was still ahead. In audience (22,550,000) and gross advertising revenue (around $52,000,000 this year) it had surpassed even the sturdy Saturday Evening Post.

Like Hercules attacked by serpents in his cradle, LIFE almost came a cropper in its infancy by woefully underestimating public demand. Its advertising rate was only $1,500 a page, based on a 250,000-a-week guarantee. When circulation shot over a million in four months, advertisers crowded aboard for a free ride. The cost of printing 750,000 unexpected copies far exceeded the revenue from advertising and circulation. Editor Henry R. Luce had earmarked $1,000,000 of Time Inc. money "to see LIFE to success or into an honorable grave"--but before rates were adjusted, $5,000,000 had been spent to keep LIFE from dying of success.

Since then (except for a brief dip in the spring of 1938) LIFE had grown steadfastly. It grew even though it ignored the kind of talking down that mass-circulation merchants like Beaverbrook and Hearst thought was good for their readers. It ran cheesecake--but also Charles A. Beard's The Republic, condensed in ten installments. Well aware that not every picture was worth 10,000 words, its editors made room for editorials, closeups, "text pieces" by men of letters (Winston Churchill, John Dos Passos, Reinhold Niebuhr, et al.). Still popularly regarded as a "picture magazine," LIFE now averages up to 20,000 words of text per issue--the wordage of a novelette. It took science out of the moonlit fantasies of the Sunday supplement, made it understandable to millions yet acceptable to scientists, in maps, diagrams, pictures of three-dimensional models and charts (with stories on food, color, electronics, plutonium, etc.).

No magazine with LIFE'S audience and price had reproduced first-rate works of art. LIFE sent 27 U.S. artists to record the story of World War II in 1,500 oils and water colors, to supplement the best photographic coverage the war had.

Two managing editors, John Shaw Billings and Daniel Longwell, saw LIFE through its first decade. Entering its second, it will have a new managing editor, dark-haired, sad-visaged Harvardman Joseph J. Thorndike Jr., the first man to join Longwell's experimental staff in 1936. At 33, Thorndike says he "is regarded by most people as a taciturn New England type, although by Massachusetts standards [I am] jovial and loquacious."

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