Quick Revival

In Philadelphia this week, Publisher Walter H. Annenberg, 45, of the Inquirer (circ. 643,985) announced a new venture in a new field. For a reported $250,000, he bought the title "Quick" from Publisher Gardner ("Mike") Cowles, who folded his pocket-size weekly last month (TIME, April 27). In mid-September, Annenberg will put on the newsstands a brand-new Quick--a Reader's Digest-sized fortnightly news-and-picture magazine with such contributors as Christian Science Monitor Editor Erwin Canham and Radio's Martha (Meet the Press) Rountree. By printing Quick on the Inquirer's own gravure presses and taking no ads, Publisher Annenberg hopes to avoid the high costs that killed Quick, estimates he can break even with a 1,000,000 circulation.

This is the second new venture for Publisher Annenberg in six months. Last January, he paid close to $1,000,000 for Manhattan's TV Guide, now puts out 14 regional editions for major cities all over the U.S. Primarily a detailed program listing, TV Guide also runs articles and features, has done well enough since it started to help finance its own expansion.

The Plaque. Of his $25 million publishing empire (Annenberg's conservative estimate), which also includes Seventeen, Daily Racing Form, Morning Telegraph and Official Detective Stories, Annenberg says proudly: "Everything's in the black." He runs the empire from his cavernous, richly decorated Inquirer office, where he sits in front of a small bronze plaque engraved with the words: "Cause my works on earth to reflect honor on my father's memory." One memory of his father, the late Moses L. ("Moe") Annenberg, that lingers in U.S. history is a three-year prison term for evading $1,217,296 in income taxes. That part of the memory, says son Walter, "has been like a whip on my back." The Moe Annenberg that Walter remembers and reveres was a self-made immigrant from East Prussia who started out as a newsboy, became the Hearst chain's circulation director, and left to build a publishing empire on the cornerstone of a racing-wire service he fondly called the "A.P. of racing news."

Fully confident that his only son would carry on after his death, Moe Annenberg (who also had seven daughters) paid more than $13 million in 1936 for the respectable Philadelphia Inquirer. Walter, who went to the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance, started out with his father in the bookkeeper's office, countersigning checks so that he could see where the money went. When Moe Annenberg bought the Inquirer, Walter became his father's assistant to learn his editorial and circulation tricks. Walter, who still knew more about art than the newspaper business, suggested that the Inquirer run a four-color reproduction of a Matisse painting in the Sunday pictorial section. Moe Annenberg said no, taught Walter a lesson in practical publishing by running instead Cassilly Adams' barroom favorite, Custer's Last Fight, which brought in a flood of requests for reprints.

Start & Stop. When Moe Annenberg was sent to prison in 1940 (he died a month after his parole in 1942) and Walter had to take charge, he quickly proved that he knew the difference between Matisse and Adams. Against the stiff competition of Robert McLean's Evening Bulletin (circ. 693,104--"In Philadelphia nearly everybody reads the Bulletin"), he kept the Inquirer growing, started Seventeen, a fashion magazine for teenagers. (He also decided that two movie magazines, Radio Guide and Click, a picture magazine, ate up more hard-to-get paper than they were worth, killed them.) While the Bulletin added readers with its quiet, unexcited coverage, the Inquirer picked up its own circulation by digging itself deep into Philadelphia civic life, in 13 years has almost doubled its circulation.

Annenberg started an annual music festival, took over the Philadelphia Forum, gave scholarships in his father's name to college students, bought the city sports Arena and, two months ago, a block-square piece of property in Penn Center (TIME, June 1) to build a community transportation center. At New Jersey's Peddie School, where he prepared for college, Publisher Annenberg proudly recalls that his classmates voted him "most likely to succeed." But, adds he modestly: "I started with an awful lot handed to me."

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