Classic publications from the 20th century. Read “news,” not history!

This is the January 13, 1942 issue of LOOK. It was published just a few weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Its primary cover article is “Our War with Japan” and its secondary is “Is John L. Lewis Washed Up?” (Lewis was a major labor movement boss.) The cover features an aircraft gunner manning his post.

The magazine contains numerous other articles about World War II, current events, etc. There are also great photos and vintage black & white advertisements. The magazine contains 60 pages and measures approximately 10.5 x 13.5 inches.

LOOK was a biweekly, general-interest magazine published in Des Moines, Iowa, from 1937 to 1971, with more of an emphasis on photographs than articles. It was a direct competitor to LIFE, which began publication months earlier and ended in 1972, a few months after LOOK shut down.

Gardner "Mike" Cowles, Jr. (1903-1985), the magazine's co-founder (with his brother John) and first editor, was executive editor of The Des Moines Register and The Des Moines Tribune. When the first issue went on sale in early 1937, it sold 705,000 copies.

Although planned to begin with the January 1937 issue, the actual first issue of LOOK to be distributed was the February 1937 issue, numbered as Volume 1, Number 2. It was published monthly for five issues (February-May 1937), then switched to biweekly starting with the May 11, 1937 issue.  Early issues, subtitled Monthly Picture Magazine, carried no advertising.

The unusual format of the early issues featured layouts of photos with long captions or very short articles. The magazine's backers described it as "an experiment based on the tremendous unfilled demand for extraordinary news and feature pictures." It was aimed at a broader readership than LIFE, promising trade papers that LOOK would have "reader interest for yourself, for your wife, for your private secretary, for your office boy."

Within weeks of its debut, more than a million copies were bought of each issue, and it became a biweekly. By 1948, it sold 2.9 million copies per issue. Circulation reached 3.7 million in 1954, and peaked at 7.75 million in 1969. Its advertising revenue reached its highest point in 1966 at $80 million. Of the leading general-interest, large-format magazines, LOOK had a circulation second only to LIFE and ahead of The Saturday Evening Post, which closed in 1969, and Collier's, which folded in 1956.