The Saturday Evening Post, once America's most popular magazine and lately a nostalgic bimonthly found in Midwestern doctors' offices, is scheduling a return from exile in Indiana to offices near its old headquarters on Washington Square in Philadelphia, along with its 191-year archive and, maybe, its seventy million dollar art collection.
The Post is back with a new design, new fiction, and reporting. "We'll be Vanity Fair meets Smithsonian," says the Post's new editor, Steve Slon, who cofounded Men's Health for Emmaus, Pennsylvania-based Rodale Press and was editor of AARP's forty-million-circulation member magazine before joining Post publisher Joan SerVaas.
"The magazine in the last thirty years was relying on nostalgia, tradition, the good old days. We'll still have that, with the old Norman Rockwell paintings (photo). But we're relegating that to a small part," Slon told me. "Mainly we will be analyzing the trends of the day."
The January-February issue includes Jailhouse Blues, by Philadelphia-based writer Todd Pitock, a piece that traces the nation's development as the "superpower of incarceration". Ex-Newsweek health writer Sharon Begley adds a piece on placebos. The cover article is a celebrity profile on Shirley MacLaine.
Slon will raid the Post archive, which includes short works by F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O'Hara (editors rejected that 'racy' Ernest Hemingway). Plus, new fiction: the Post's first Great American Fiction Contest drew 250 entries. The winner, Lucy Jane Bledsoe's piece, Wolf, will be celebrated next month at a Post comeback party at Michael's in New York City.
The old Post occupied what is now the Curtis Center high-rise on Independence Square and a sprawling printing complex at Curtis Park near Darby. The new Post is negotiating for a suite in the Public Ledger Building, next to the Curtis Center. (Cyrus H.K. Curtis also owned the Public Ledger newspaper.) It's "just a toehold, until we get established here," Slon says. "I'm looking for a managing editor. We'll have a reporter and a couple of web editors." If all goes well, the business staff will follow.
The SerVaas family, which bought the Post after a 1969 shutdown, inherited more than the magazine's management. "We have art, including half a dozen Rockwell originals, and sixty or seventy paintings," said Slon, who estimated the worth of the art at seventy million dollars. "It's been a traveling collection. We'd like to create a gallery. The family cares very deeply."
Rico says it'll be interesting to see how long it lasts this time...
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