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Whenever wealthy Meatpacker Henry Blackman Sell picks up a magazine, he has a great yen to rewrite the stories, rearrange the pictures. Henry Sell is the inventor of Sell's Liver Pate and a dozen other fancy canned meats, but he was once literary editor of the Chicago Daily News, editor of Harper's Bazaar, and editor-in-chief of a string of Butterick Publishing Co. magazines--and he never quite got over it. Now, says Sell, "every time I go through a magazine I'm like an old fire horse. When I hear the bell, and see the smoke and flame, it always gets me up." Last week the 59-year-old fire horse went back into harness as editor of slick, sophisticated Town & Country.

Town & Country has been quietly slipping ever since Editor Harry Bull resigned from the 100-year-old Hearst-owned monthly (TIME, April 28, 1947). Bull's successor, Paris-born Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, didn't make the grade. Casting around for somebody new, the top Hearst brass asked ex-Hearstling Sell whether he knew a good editor. Said Sell: "Yes, me!" It was a deal, with the understanding that Editor Sell would go on running his meat business and keeping an eye on his Blaker Advertising Agency.

Switching careers is an old habit with Sell, who never finished Culver Military Academy but has succeeded at almost everything else he ever tried. He has been glove salesman, reporter, interior decorator, nightclub promoter and vitamin manufacturer. He turned out a slogan ("Have you been taking your vitamins?") that helped make vitamins big business, and wrote a book on home furnishings that sold 100,000 copies. He wears the Legion of Honor for promoting French fashions.

Last week Sell moved into Town & Country, moved out De Gunzburg's desk ("I never use one"), and drew up a list of employees to be fired. Sell intends to keep Town & Country "a magazine for people of means and taste." but thinks that a stronger staff will show there are at least 100,000 of them instead of the 50,000 who now buy the magazine. Says he: "I'm very happy to be back. It's like an opening--as if I were an actor, which of course I am. Last night at the Colony Restaurant, George Jean Nathan got up and welcomed me home."

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