The Press: Funk's Amoeba

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Year and a half ago Publisher Wilfred John Funk of the deFunked Literary Digest started a new publishing venture, a 128-page, digest-size, 25¢ "Popular Guide to Desirable Living," Your Life. Publisher Funk's formula was as simple as it was shrewd: "If I talk about myself I'm a bore. If I talk about other people I'm a gossip. But if I talk about you I'm a damned interesting fellow."

Publisher Funk devoted a section of Your Life to each of what he considered life's major problems—Health, Love, Fortune, Charm, Children, Conversation—added a section on Words because he is a lexicographer at heart, tossed in a digest of an inspirational book for good measure. Printing short articles in which big names talked to little readers on such subjects as "Be Glad Your Wife's Neurotic" and "Why Commit Suicide?" he soon ran his magazine's circulation to more than 100,000.

Last year, looking for a way further to capitalize on his formula, Publisher Funk decided that Your Life was capable of subdivision. He took the charm department of Your Life, christened it Your Personality, fed it with such appetizers as "Woman's Life Is Ruled by Fear" and "I am a Virgin, But—." Started as a quarterly, Your Personality was a full-grown monthly by March 1939.

This week Funk's Your Life amoeba suffered another division with the publication of Your Health. Well aware of the prevalence of hypochondria in the U. S., Publisher Funk has specialized in such articles as "Tobacco and You," "What Coffee Does to You," "The Truth About Antiseptics," "Throw Away Your Cathartics?" With 175,000 copies of his first issue ordered, he hopes that quarterly Your Health will, as its predecessor has done, soon grow into a monthly.

Bustling Publisher Funk, whose idea is unquestionably the most successful since the picture magazines', spent 30 years as the forgotten man of Funk & Wagnalls before he struck out for himself. While the Literary Digest sickened under Co-Publisher Robert J. Cuddihy (who had acquired 56% of the stock), Wilfred Funk had to amuse himself with such unprofitable pastimes as compiling a dog dictionary, getting a reputation as a prankster (he tore small towels to shreds) and writing a batch of light verse. Sample:

"A girl who wears a cotton stocking Need never give her door a locking. . . ."