Instant Success
The first issue was published in 1952 under the headline "The Lid is Off!". Under the slogan "Tells the Facts and Names the Names" Confidential soon became the fastest growing magazine in the U.S. After only a couple of issues the magazine claimed its circulation was four million copies. Robert Harrison was estimated to make half a million dollars per issue.
By July 1955, TIME was decrying Confidential's success: "In a little more than two years, a 25ยข magazine called Confidential, based on the proposition that millions like to wallow in scurrility, has become the biggest newsstand seller in the U.S. Newsmen have called Confidential ("Tells the Facts and Names the Names") everything from "scrawling on privy walls" to a "sewer sheet of supercharged sex." But with each bimonthly issue, printed on cheap paper and crammed with splashy pictures, Confidential's sale has grown even faster than its journalistic reputation has fallen."
Read more about this topic: Confidential (magazine)
Famous quotes containing the words instant and/or success:
“For an instant I see the sky, the different skies, then they turn to faces, agonies, loves, the different loves, happiness too, yes there was that too, unhappily.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“The two-party system has given this country the war of Lyndon Johnson, the Watergate of Nixon, and the incompetence of Carter. Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life-rafts.”
—Eugene J. McCarthy (b. 1916)