Making Culture Pay

The institutional title--Smithsonian --suggests a museum guide heavy on diagrams and dry prose. In fact, the magazine is as muscular and attractive as the bare-chested young blacksmith who posed for a recent cover picture. He symbolized one faction in a New England town embroiled in a fight over a polluted lake. This month's cover photo is a stark snow scene; the story tells of winter life in Siberia. Inside, other striking color pictures illustrate a variety of lively stories that explore everything from contemporary culture ("Cross-country with Shakespeare") to offbeat Americana (Tom Thumb's wedding and the love life of George Washington).

Thanks to its unpredictable mix and sparkling graphics, Smithsonian, a monthly published under the aegis of Washington's Smithsonian Institution, has become one of the nation's fastest-growing new magazines. It advertises its existence sparingly and does not appear on newsstands. Yet in the four years since its birth it has attracted more than 500,000 affluent subscribers (median family income: $21,150). Impressed by that performance, advertisers have been doubling Smithsonian's revenue each year; in the last year they purchased more than 400 pages. Comparable growth is expected in 1974. The magazine, which readers can get only by joining the Smithsonian Associates for a $10 annual membership fee, could now break even on subscriptions alone.

Smithsonian has never had Government support; it was launched on a $50,000 contribution from an anonymous donor. With this modest nest egg, and the Institution's credit as backing, Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley hired Edward K. Thompson, managing editor of LIFE from 1949 to 1961, to head the new venture.

No House Organ. A crusty, demanding journalist who works in a cloud of cigar smoke, Thompson, 66, stipulated that the magazine was not to become a house organ of the Smithsonian; he has maintained a wary distance from the Institution's staffers. Thompson was instructed that "we should be interested in the kinds of things the Smithsonian is interested in." Says he: "I added to that, 'the kinds of things the Smithsonian should be interested in.' "

That allows Smithsonian to cast a wide editorial net. It reports on the natural and physical sciences, fine and folk arts. It also recounts history that Thompson finds "relevant to today." The magazine sometimes seems a cross between American Heritage and the National Geographic, but its articles also frequently appear more topical and better written. Occasionally Thompson runs a piece that borders on the banal; last month's attempt to describe life astride an earthquake fault in California was conveyed in words and pictures as wooden as the fatalism of the town's residents. By contrast, a report on the good life in Sweden's prisons documents in taut style that country's progressive approach to penology. This month's Smithsonian takes an engaging look at one man's determined search for the Sasquatch, an American cousin of the Abominable Snowman.

Smithsonian has no staff writers or photographers. Thompson's freelance contributors include some impressive talent: Authors Russell Lynes and Vine Deloria, Illustrators Rowland Emett and Saul Steinberg, former LIFE Photographers Carl Mydans and Dmitri Kessel. Thompson gets by with an in-house editorial staff of 9K 1/2("I'm the half). He thinks that the readers who have found Smithsonian have an appetite for variety. Says he: "We're specialized for people who are reasonably well educated and who are curious not just about one thing but about a number of things." The magazine has no false egalitarian pretensions, he adds. "We aren't snobbish by intention; it just turned out that way."

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