618
DWIGH-T MACDONA-LD
oU,r _biggest-but
al~q
much worse. One must go to London
to see how trivial and mindless the popular press can become,
But if the masses have their dailies, the classes have a type of
periodical for which there
is
no American analogue, and I
think the vulgarity of the mass press and the high quality of the
class press are both the result of the sharper definition of cul–
turl;l.l lines there.
- : -This
is
a magazine-reading country. When one comes back
from abroad, the two displays of American abundance that
dazzle one are the supermarkets and the newsstands. There are
no British equivalents of our Midcult magazines like
Atlantic
and
The Saturday Review,
or of our mass magazines like
Life
~nd
The Saturday Evening Post
and
Look,
or of our betwixt–
&"between magazines like
Esquire
and
T he New Yorker
(which
also encroach on the "little magazine" area). There are one
or two women's magazines, I suppose because the women's
magazine
is
such an ancient and essential form of journalism
that even the English dig it.
The one kind of magazine we haven't had over here since
the liberal weeklies stubbed their toes on the Moscow Trials is
the serious, widely read weekly. The English have at least
seven:
T he Spectator, T he New Statesman, The Economist,
The Times Literary Supplement, The Listener, The Observer
and
The Sunday Times.
The first four have circulations
be–
tween 40,000 and 90,000.
The Listener
has, I believe, over
200,000; it is published by the B.B.C. and is made up almost
wholly of broadcast material-how long would it take to ac–
cumulate a similar issue from our own radio and television?
Months? Years?
The Observer
and
The Sunday Times
(no
connection with the daily
Times,
which doesn't come out on
~unday)
are really Sunday magazines in .a newspaper format;
their special articles and their extensive review sections are on
the .level of .the other weeklies; and they have circulations of
oy~r.
half a million. (They are post-war phenomena, .analogous
to; our own boom in quality paperbacks and classical records.)
