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3 - The Fiction Factory Expands: Horwitz in the Second Half of the 1950s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2022

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Summary

An advertisement in the 2 May 1955 edition of the monthly trade magazine Newspaper News (Fig. 3.1) announced ‘six long established companies, each outstanding in its own field, have amalgamated their administration into the new holding company, Horwitz Publications Inc. Pty’. These companies were all subsidiaries of what had until then been known as Associated General Publications, Pty Ltd, and their integration was an attempt by Horwitz to improve business efficiencies including, as the advertisement boasted, ‘one account – one point of contact’. The advertisement offers a glimpse into the size and diversity of the newly established publishing entity: seven newspapers, including the previously mentioned Sporting Weekly; six magazines, including the trade magazines Hospital Administration and Hotel and Café News; three magazines aimed directly at women, Our Home andSecrets, True Life, and one ‘Australia's most outstanding magazine for men’, Male. An example of the more salacious type of publication that was emerging in Australia in the 1950s, Male was a little-known foray by Horwitz into the segment of the male publication market referred to in the last chapter as barbershop magazines. These were known in America as the bachelor magazine or what would later be referred to as men's adventure or ‘sweat magazines’. Other publications mentioned in the Newspaper News advertisement include: the ‘pocket book’ series of Carter Brown and Marc Brody, as well as the Lion Books series of American crimefiction reprints; 30 comic titles, comprising 14 million comics annually; and a large number of non-fiction books, covering everything from cookery to Houses, Interiors and Projects written by well-known modernist architect Harry Seidler. The advertisement also mentions a ‘Calvert Publishing Co’, but whether this was the publisher referred to in the previous chapter is unclear. In 1956, the newly established entity moved into a specially built office complex at 400 Sussex Street in Sydney's CBD, called ‘Horwitz House’, designed by Seidler, which still exists in what is now the centre of Sydney's Chinatown. The Sydney Morning Herald had reported plans for the construction two years earlier, an eight-storey office block, built on the site of three existing buildings, with a completely glass front ‘protected from the sun's rays by adjustable aluminium louvers’.

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Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2022

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