The last of the small time spenders - Kearny Publishing - includes related article

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May 15, 1994 by Michael Kaplan

Kearny Publishing's skinflint operating practices may resonate with past-era genre pulps, but now they're right in tune with the frugal nineties.

"PUBLISHING IS A BUSINESS THAT IS not run like a business; it's run with egos," declares Hank McQueeney. Face reddening, voice rising with indignation, the 30-year magazine-industry veteran continues, "You get people who want to edit copy when they buy articles, then they want another person to proofread it, and another person to read it a third time. We don't need that. That's not how this business works."

As president of Kearny Publishing, McQueeney handles the day-to-day operations in what may be the last of a nearly extinct breed of magazine sweatshops--places where a single art director designs six titles, where production is an elaborate choreography of 30 titles a month, where copy editing is a luxury. The industry once was rife with similar outfits: Ideal, Sterling, McFadden, Country Wide. They cranked out cheap, bottom-tier titles for disenfranchised audiences of flying-saucer buffs, gun fanatics and aficionados of steamy detective stories and marital misadventure.

With a few exceptions, however, the low-rent iconoclasts have been nudged out by media corporations backing slicker and glossier books. "Distributors won't front you money for start-ups anymore, and printers are in dire trouble," laments McQueeney. After unplugging his telephone so that we won't be disturbed ("I have no secretary," he says. "What would I do with a secretary?"), the brawny McQueeney continues, "You stopped being able to bootstrap a magazine and things splintered off. The entrepreneurs were out in left field."

From its unfinished floor of offices in Manhattan's grubby sewing-machine district, Kearny produces almost 20 full-size magazines that range in frequency from 13 to six times a year, and about two-dozen quarterly sex-letter digests. Its magazines, with an average cover price of $4.50, include skin titles (Adult Cinema Review, Blue Boy, Jock and Oui); low-circ, no-budget monthlies for subcultures (Iron Horse and Karate International); and head bangers' books Shout! and Live Wire. All of the titles are newsstand-driven.

The jewel in the publisher's crown, though, is a skeleton-staffed, shadow-of-its-former-self Creem that was acquired cheap from a motivated seller in 1992. Once billed as "America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine," Creem, after going through a couple of owners, had fallen on hard times. Then, four years ago, Floridian investor Shea Ralph licensed the name and invested $1 million or so into the 25-year-old magazine. "After a while, they didn't have the money to get more issues printed," recalls McQueeney, explaining that he agreed to take the magazine on with its publisher/editor Marvin Jarrett as part of the package.

"Marvin said that he wanted to keep a finger in the art direction. We told him that would be fine. He hired a guy here in New York--for $25,000. I almost died!" McQueeney recalls. "I said, 'Marvin, what are you doing? If you want an art director, we have one sitting right here in the office |who was already working on several Kearny publications~. He's as good as anyone in the field. He can do your magazine.'" Then he adds, "Marvin went way over budget and we had a falling out. So I fired him."

Jarrett remembers the situation a bit differently. "Obviously, what he said is not accurate," says an annoyed Jarrett, when reached at the Los Angeles office where he publishes alternative music magazine Ray Gun. Beyond that, he says he prefers not to comment on McQueeney. "We're in two different leagues. The guy's a liar, and I can't understand how this would be of any interest to anybody," says Jarrett, before hanging up.

KEARNY IS A BUYER OF LAST RESORT for publishers seeking to unload a title. One magazine consultant describes the firm thus: "They buy magazines that are pieces of shit and turn them into even bigger pieces of shit." McQueeney and company, however, are unconcerned about their pariah status. Unlike many publisher wannabes, they know who they are, they know what they do, and--most important--they make money.

Sitting in his unadorned office with its scuffed walls, a folding table for a desk, McQueeney is in his element. It's been his element for the last 20 years, when he first joined forces with a book printer named Murray Traub. Then located in Goshen, New York, Traub's Goshen Litho had purchased a line of low-end genre books from a company called McFadden Bartel in 1971. He rechristened the publisher Manor Books (so that he could continue to use its MB logo) and, with McQueeney as his director of marketing, kept the presses busy into the late seventies. "That's when people stopped reading books," says McQueeney. "So we got into magazines."

They printed up some one-shots (covering Elvis, Marilyn and Michael Jackson) and launched a few ongoing titles in the horoscope and crossword-puzzle categories. Then, as now, doing prepress and printing with Traub's Raven Press in Sussex, Wisconsin, keeps costs down and allows Kearny's publications to be thrown together in a manner that some might view as overly expedient. "I can put a magazine out in no time," McQueeney brags, pointing to the cover of Fantastic Dinosaurs, which looks like it was color Xeroxed from a text book. "We put out half a million copies of this within six days of Jurassic Park being number one. The editorial took two days. We sold 38 percent. The break-even |at $2.95 per copy~ was half of that. On the cover we said that it has a $19.95 value."