Haresh Shah
Taking A Stab At Respectability
When Celia – the young woman who so beautifully interprets and illustrates Playboy Stories week after week, returned the copy of my July 1988 issue of Playboy featuring Cindy Crawford on the cover, she had secured the pages with a little yellow and pink binder-clips. Apparently the pages of the issue had come apart at the perfect bound stiff spine, just like that of the cheap paperbacks from the Fifties. The issue was never before opened and was in mint condition. Quite unsettling for an avid fan and the collector of the magazine.
When the first issue of the perfect bound Playboy dated October 1985 landed on my desk, sometime around the first week of September, with the cover blurb proclaiming: COLLECTOR’S EDITION / THERE IS A BOLD NEW LOOK UNDER OUR COVER, I felt disoriented like never before. Devoid of the staples and lying there flat as the thick Dutch pancake, it felt akin to me returning to the little town of Schutterwald in Germany to visit my old landlady Frau Lipps – fully expecting, as in the past for her to have prepared my favorite Wiener Schnitzel with pommes frites and a small side of butter lettuce salad – instead to find a plate of a salmon filet with boiled potatoes and green beans. It threw me completely off balance.
Even though there were talks in the air for a while to switch to the perfect binding, deep down in my heart I still held out hopes that Hefner would never agree to such a move. But he did and now I was holding in my hands something I had thought would never come to pass.
On the Playbill page the editors wrote: As you know by now PLAYBOY is a tremendously well put-together magazine. And for the past 381 issues, the thing that has held it together, through thick and thin, through Marilyn Monroe and through Venice Kong, had been a humble underappreciated yet respectably old-fashioned staple. What you have in your hands right now is the first spanking-new tough spined staple-free PLAYBOY. So much for the tough spine.
Playboy began and remained saddle stitched for more than thirty years – the standard magazine binding format used by the majority of large circulation consumer magazines around the world. It’s flexible, it’s reader friendly and cheaper than perfect bound magazines, such as National Geographic, Architectural Digest and Vanity Fair and now Playboy – the stiff unbending coffee table books.
First and foremost, Playboy’s identity has always been its centerfolds, so much so that Hefner himself has famously said at one of the Playmates reunions that without you, I would be a literary magazine. The centerfolds were defined by the young women who occupied the specially printed three page gatefold, inserted and stapled near the naval of the Playmate of that month. And because of the way the magazine was bound, it was easy to find her with your finger tips even with your eyes shut. Open your eyes and find her there with her enticing eyes staring at you and the rest of her laid out bare in all her glory. Not to mention how easy it was to lay it flat when open and feel its soft and smooth bulge and the curvaceous spine. You could fold it, you could bend it, toss and turn while lying down on your sofa and reading thousands of words of its interviews and in-depth articles comfortably without having to keep forcing those pages open.
These kind of decisions are not taken lightly. To change even a layout of a single page in a well established magazine requires very serious considerations. Because more than anything else, even the slightest deviation from the standard format can disorient the loyal readers.
As I am writing this in October 2013, The New Yorker has changed radically its front of the book section Goings On About Town to the point where it’s totally unrecognizable from its classic, albeit stale version. Even though I think that the new design is more contemporary with lot of white spaces, new elegant type face and all, now several weeks later, I still feel lost and disoriented and can’t seem to navigate my way around those pages. But I am sure, I’ll get used to it and even forget the old design. Alas, no such luck with Playboy’s perfect binding even after twenty eight years.
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When I worked for Time, the editors decided after forty years of retaining the same look with which the magazine had debuted back in 1923, time had now come to give it a fresh new look. Change the design, change the typeface. Change the philosophy of the covers. That’s a giant step, especially within Time Inc. family. It was Life that glowed with flashes of colors inside its snappier articles – sort of prelude to the video clips with narrative text. But Time magazine remained black and white for the longest with its mini-newspaper look and the format, wrapped inside its red bordered covers framing some of the most alluring illustrations. It wasn’t up until in the Seventies that the first photographs began to appear within those red borders. When Time introduced color photos inside its editorial pages, they were sparse and limited to a four or eight page signature printed on higher quality coated paper. Even discounting that the color pages cost more to reproduce and print, that wasn’t why they hung onto its black and white origin. The biggest concern in their hanging onto the original mono color format as long as they did was the shock of switching to the color would give its readers. I am not a hundred percent sure now, but I faintly remember their instituting minor design changes in the late Sixties – I believe with the help of one of the most celebrated and creative designers, Milton Glaser.
But it wasn’t up until 1977 that the magazine was completely redesigned by the legendary Walter Bernard. And not until well into the Eighties that more and more color pages began to crop up in Time. But not before discussing endlessly the pros and the cons of introducing photographs on the covers and changing their inside look from staid mini-newspaper like black and white pages to its current contemporary, bold and colorful layouts.
The second most popular feature in Playboy has always been its interviews. Even though the magazine was launched in December 1953, it wasn’t up until September 1962 that Playboy interview made its debut with Miles Davis talking to the journalist Alex Haley. Since then Playboy interviews have become the standards against which all other interviews are measured. And its simple three columns, three iconic black and white photos format has become an immediately recognizable graphic identity. So much so that to this date, it remains unchanged, though as of February 2009 issue it has replaced the black and white with the color photos. And yet to an old aficionado like me, those color photos seem more pasted than they look natural. Some international editions tried out different formats including full page photographs or illustrated profiles of the personalities, but at the end of the day, the only image that conjures up in one’s mind at the mention of Playboy interviews is that of the three head shots with the quotes underneath them.
Then why you would think Playboy eventually succumbed to such a radical physical makeover as switching from its loyal tried and tested saddle stitch binding to the pretentious perfect binding? This much I know:
Back in January 1983, Playboy Italy changed hands from Rizzoli to Mondadori. In an effort to transpose the edition’s perceived readership from the truck drivers to the sleek and sophisticated, Mondadori approached my boss Lee Hall, asking for the permission for them to go perfect bound. We had internal meeting and concluded swiftly; that would no longer be Playboy. Even so, Lee in his practical wisdom, sent out a memo, I think to the US edition publisher Nat Lehrman, Editorial Director Arthur Kretchmer and the President Christie Hefner, requesting their input. It was probably circulated among other top executives. The response from the most was NO. Except a scribble at the top of the first page from Arthur, which said something to the effect, are we sure we want to say no? From what I understood, the logic behind his question was that let one of our editions try it out and then see what happens. What I also understood was that some were in favor, probably the advertising bunch. In the end, Hefner must have been sold the idea of the advantages of giving his baby an “upscale” look. But I or even Lee weren’t privy to any of that information. So I decided to ask Gary Cole – now the retired Photography Director, who has been a friend and with whom I have remained in touch. Here is what he had to say:
“The push to switch the magazine to perfect binding came almost exclusively from the Ad Department. Most magazines were already perfect bound. Ads had to be created just a little differently for a saddle stitched magazine. You realize that the outer pages of a saddle stitched magazine has to be wider to be able to wrap all the way around the inner pages. So the Ad Dept. convinced Hef.
“As you know, Hef was very, very resistant to change. One of his favorite axioms was “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Another was “Why do we need to reinvent the wheel?” He didn’t like perfect binding. He liked the more open look that saddle stitch gave him. And he was very married to the idea of the centerfold being in the center of the magazine. Everything was built around that. Of course, when ad sales began to falter, when money became tighter, when he continued to hear from the Ad people that they could sell more ads if the magazine switched to perfect bind, he finally relented. I honestly don’t believe that it gained us one page of advertising. The reluctance of advertisers was based on the growing sensitivity in the business community to the subject of nudity. As long as Playboy had nudes in it, there were lots of advertisers who were afraid to come near us regardless of how we were bound.”
All true. And yet, something kept gnawing at me. In my mind, I still remembered that tiny scribble at the top of the memo, initialed AK. Since I left Playboy at the end of 1993, I had seen Arthur Kretchmer only once. I wasn’t exactly comfortable approaching him, but that’s what I had to do. I shot out an e-mail to Arthur. He was most gracious and forthcoming.
“As for perfect binding. I remember the meeting with Hefner very well. It was not an editorial meeting. It was a business meeting. After the full business presentation was made — and it was made mostly from an advertising sales point of view — Hef said, “The reasoning sounds all right, but you’re asking me to re-invent the wheel. This is a gamble that I’m very reluctant to take.”
“He asked my opinion, and I said something along these lines: I thought that getting rid of the staple would move the magazine into the category of classy mainstream magazines — a psychological shift that I thought the magazine was ready for.
“He considered that. There was more conversation. I’m not sure that he went on to approve the change in that meeting, but I think he did. I think he said yes before that meeting was over.
“In the name of complete honesty, sometime after we made the change, I thought we’d made a mistake. Not right away, but certainly within the year. All the business people were happy. Even the newsstand guys liked the way the magazine stacked. But I became uncomfortable. Obviously we never seriously considered going back.
“I don’t remember the circulating memos that you describe, but your telling of the story rings true. You have chosen the right words with ‘upscale look.’ I think once Hefner saw that as part of the conversation, he became a convert.”
I got my answer with that gnawing feeling now subsided.
© Haresh Shah
Illustration: Celia Rose Marks
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IN PRAISE OF MY BUICK
As of now, I’ve had seven cars. The first one, a Chevy Nova practically killed me many times over. But I missed her so when sold it to a couple of neighborhood kids. The second, an Oldsmobile Cutlass was stolen, requiring me to buy my first brand new set of wheels, a Buick Skylark. It went with me from Chicago to Munich to Santa Barbara and back to Chicago and many other exciting places in-between and had become as much a part of me during those ten most dynamic years of my life. It was loyal, it was reliable and it never let me down. The least I can do is to pay a little tribute to her
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