Look – March 28, 1950

Description

This is the March 28, 1950 issue of Look magazine. A cover article is titled “Inside FDR – John Gunther’s Greatest Story.” The magazine contains 116 pages and measures approximately 10.5 x 13.25 inches.
The magazine contains numerous articles, features, black & white photos and illustrations and vintage color and black & white advertisements. It gives you a window into the start of the “American decade.”
Look was a biweekly, general-interest magazine published in Des Moines, Iowa, from 1937 to 1971, with more of an emphasis on photographs than articles. It was a direct competitor to LIFE, which began publication months earlier and ended in 1972, a few months after Look shut down.
Gardner "Mike" Cowles, Jr. (1903-1985), the magazine's co-founder (with his brother John) and first editor, was executive editor of The Des Moines Register and The Des Moines Tribune. When the first issue went on sale in early 1937, it sold 705,000 copies.
Although planned to begin with the January 1937 issue, the actual first issue of Look to be distributed was the February 1937 issue, numbered as Volume 1, Number 2. It was published monthly for five issues (February-May 1937), then switched to biweekly starting with the May 11, 1937 issue.
Early issues, subtitled Monthly Picture Magazine, carried no advertising.
The unusual format of the early issues featured layouts of photos with long captions or very short articles. The magazine's backers described it as "an experiment based on the tremendous unfilled demand for extraordinary news and feature pictures." It was aimed at a broader readership than LIFE, promising trade papers that Look would have "reader interest for yourself, for your wife, for your private secretary, for your office boy."
Within weeks of its debut, more than a million copies were bought of each issue, and it became a biweekly. By 1948, it sold 2.9 million copies per issue. Circulation reached 3.7 million in 1954, and peaked at 7.75 million in 1969. Its advertising revenue reached its highest point in 1966 at million. Of the leading general-interest, large-format magazines, Look had a circulation second only to LIFE and ahead of The Saturday Evening Post, which closed in 1969, and Collier's, which folded in 1956.
Look ceased publication with its issue of October 19, 1971, the victim of a million loss in revenues in 1970 (television had cut deeply into its advertising revenues), a slack economy, and rising postal rates. Circulation was at 6.5 million when it closed.
Notable staff photographers and illustrators included Stanley Kubrick (before he started his feature-film career); James Karales, who covered the Civil Rights Movement throughout its duration. Among his memorable photographs is the iconic photograph of the Selma to Montgomery march showing people proudly marching along the highway under a cloudy, turbulent sky; and Norman Rockwell, who, after closing his career with the Saturday Evening Post, began drawing illustrations for Look.