A great one remembered… SATURDAY REVIEW

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Feb 1, 2003 by Greg Lindsay

Byline: Greg Lindsay

America's trio of big-think magazines - The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's - once were part of a foursome, which included the esteemed Saturday Review. While three of these titles survived difficult times in the late '70s and early '80s, finding salvation in deep-pocketed patrons or nonprofit foundations, The Saturday Review pinballed from one hapless owner to another, finally coming to rest in some unlikely hands - those of Penthouse's Robert Guccione, Sr.

At the peak of its influence, the Review persuasively campaigned for the treatment of Hiroshima victims (in the '40s), disarmament (the '50s), and against involvement in Vietnam (the '60s). In 1971, under editor Norman Cousins - who assumed the top spot at age 25 in 1940 - the magazine's circulation maxed out at 660,000.

The young and enormously talented Cousins was handed the reins of the magazine by its founder, Henry Seidel Canby, who had taken the weekly books supplement of the then-progressive New York Post and in 1924 spun it out into The Saturday Review of Literature. (It would keep that title until 1952.) Cousins resigned in 1971 when new owners split the Review into four separate, single-themed magazines. That concept lasted just two years, after which Cousins returned, though the magazine was in bankruptcy. He reduced his role to columnist after yet another investor group took control in 1977.

Several ever-more-whimpering deaths and futile rebirths followed. Most observers chose to designate 1982 as the year Saturday Review died. That's when Financial World publisher Robert Weingarten pulled the plug on his investment in the magazine, though an entirely new team of Washington insiders tried to resurrect it just two years later.

In 1987, Bob Guccione's General Media acquired the Review's assets. Guccione briefly relaunched it in 1993 as an online-only publication on AOL. His company still owns the title, but a spokesman says there are no plans to revive it.