Look (American magazine)

Look

Actress Anne Gwynne, a 1939–40 model for Catalina Swimwear, was featured on the January 30, 1940 cover of Look.
Frequency	Bi-weekly
First issue	February 1937 (1937-February)
Final issue	October 19, 1971
Company	Cowles Media
Country	United States
Based in	Des Moines, Iowa
Language	English
ISSN	0024-6336

Look was a bi-weekly, general-interest magazine published in Des Moines, Iowa, from 1937 to 1971, with more of an emphasis on photographs than articles. A large-size magazine of 11 in × 14 in (280 mm × 360 mm), it was generally considered a competitor to Life magazine, which began publication months earlier and ended in 1972, a few months after Look ceased publication.

It is known for helping launch the career of film director Stanley Kubrick, who was a staff photographer.

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 bi-weekly starting with the May 11, 1937 issue. Page numbering on early issues counted the front cover as page one. 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, more than a million copies were bought of each issue, and it became a bi-weekly. 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 peaked 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.