Saturday Review (U.S. Magazine) - Publishing History

Publishing History

From 1920 to 1924, Literary Review was a Saturday supplement to the New York Evening Post. Henry Seidel Canby established it as a separate publication in 1924. Until 1952, it was known as The Saturday Review of Literature.

The magazine was purchased by the McCall Corporation in 1961.

Saturday Review reached its maximum circulation of 660,000 in 1971. Ironically, its decline began in the same year. Longtime editor Cousins resigned when it was sold to a group led by the two co-founders of Psychology Today, which they had recently sold to Boise Cascade. They split the magazine into four separate monthlies, but the experiment ended in insolvency two years later. Former editor Cousins purchased it and recombined the units with World, a new magazine he had started in the meantime. Briefly it was called SR World before it reverted to Saturday Review. The magazine was sold in 1977 to a group led by Carll Tucker, who sold it in 1980 to Macro Communications, the owner of the business magazine Financial World. It was insolvent again in 1982 and was sold to Missouri entrepreneur Jeffrey Gluck. A new group of investors in 1984 resurrected it briefly. According to Greg Lindsay writing for Folio twenty years later, most people consider 1982 "the year Saturday Review died".

Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione acquired all properties in 1987 and used the title briefly from 1993 for an online publication at AOL.