American travel magazine
Holiday |
| Categories | Travel magazine |
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| Frequency | bi-annual |
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| First issue | 1946; 78 years ago (1946) |
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| Final issue | 1977; 47 years ago (1977) |
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| Country | United States |
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| Based in | Philadelphia |
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| Language | English |
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| Website | www.holiday-magazine.com |
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| ISSN | 0018-3520 |
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Holiday was an American travel magazine published from 1946 to 1977, whose circulation grew to more than one million subscribers at its height. The magazine employed writers such as Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Lawrence Durell, James Michener, and E. B. White.
In 2014, the magazine was relaunched as a bi-annual magazine based in Paris, but written in English.
History
Launched by the Curtis Publishing Company, the first issue of Holiday appeared in March 1946. The magazine was headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the Curtis Center near Independence Hall. After a lackluster start, with the fifth issue Ted Patrick became editor, a position he held until his sudden death in 1964.[1] By the end of the first year the circulation topped 425,000.[2]
The magazine was known as a cosmopolitan travel wishbook with photo essays in full-color oversize 11 X 13.5 package along with articles by famous authors.[2] John Lewis Stage, a photographer for Holiday described how Patrick enlisted name authors: "The concept was basically to get famous authors who had maybe one or two weeks in between their books or projects to go and travel and write glorious pieces. So you’d have James Michener sent off to the South Pacific, for example. It was an intriguing way to put together a magazine. It was an oddball publication that used photographs to tell stories".[2]
Paul Theroux writing about Paul Bowles said of the magazine, "The frivolous name masked a serious literary mission. The English fiction writers, V. S. Pritchett and Lawrence Durrell also traveled for this magazine, so did John Steinbeck after he won his Nobel Prize for literature, when he crisscrossed the United States with his dog....Bowles wrote a piece for Holiday about hashish, another of his enthusiasms, since he was a life-long stoner.[3]
The magazine came of age in the Jet Age, when Americans were beginning to travel for leisure and joining the jet set was a glamorous aspiration.[2] A Vanity Fair article in 2013 stated that "what Vogue did for fashion, Holiday did for destinations.[2] Many remember the atmosphere of the editorial department as resembling Mad-Men. The son of executive editor Carl Biemiller described the atmosphere "there was one hell of a cocktail-party circuit..."[2]
E. B. White wrote his 7500-word essay on the city of New York, "Here is New York", for the magazine in 1949. White's stepson, Roger Angell, worked at the magazine in 1948.The essay was published as a gift book by Harper and it was also released as a Book-of-the-Month Club edition. Vanity Fair has since said of the essay, "It would become not only one of the most famous essays ever composed about the island of Manhattan but perhaps the finest. Over the years its plaintive language has been categorized as both poem and hymn." After 9/11, Vanity Fair also published the essay in book form in 2002 as a tribute.[2]
By 1961 the magazine was making almost $10 million a year in revenue, and by the next year circulation had grown to just under a million.[2]
After Ted Patrick's sudden death in 1964[4] there were internal issues between the current staff and Curtis Publishing Company over the direction of the magazine. Don A. Schanche of The Saturday Evening Post succeeded Patrick as editor.[5] In response four of the editors, Harry Sions (editorial director), Frank Zachary (managing editor), Albert H. Farnsworth (executive editor), and Louis F. V. Mercier (pictures editor) resigned.[6] Several of the magazine's writers, artists and photographers put out a large ad in the New York Times to "salute" the four as "good editors."[6]
In 1977, Curtis sold Holiday to the publisher of Travel, a competing magazine, who merged the titles as a new publication, Travel Holiday.[7]
21st century relaunch
Holiday relaunched in April 2014[8] by the Atelier Franck Durand, a Paris-based art direction studio, with Marc Beaugé as editor in chief and Franck Durand[9] as creative director. The magazine is a bi-annual, conceived in Paris and written in English. Its official website mentions an upcoming café[10] and clothing line. Durand described the new magazine, "It is not like the old Holiday when they had millions and they'd travel for weeks and week. But the concept is the same."[11]
The issue n°373 of Holiday Magazine, first issue since the relaunch, was dedicated to the year 1969 and Ibiza.[12]
The issue n°373 includes contributions from photographers Josh Olins,[13] Karim Sadli and Mark Peckmezian, a short novel about Ibiza by novelist Arthur Dreyfus, a story on Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin's New York loft, and the cover features a chosen fragment of Remed's painting "Leonogone". The first issue featured an essay about the history of the original Holiday Magazine.[11]
