Word: agha
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...director for his U. S. string of swank magazines. The latest candidate had clinched the job by the calm disdain with which he dismissed able, dapper Publisher Nast's theories on illustration and makeup. This Young Turk was in fact a young Turk, by name Mehemed Fehmy Agha. That was ten years ago. Last week PM, the lively little magazine for production managers and art directors, devoted its latest issue to Agha's American Decade. Its "paeans with pictures from colleagues and disciples" demonstrated how great has been, still is Dr. Agha's influence...
...Agha's success formula is to start a publishing fad, develop another before its popularity has waned. First in the U. S. was he to drop capital letters from a magazine's typography, to "bleed" illustrations to a page's edge. Other dodges of his: asymmetric layouts, wide white margins ("space for your laundry list"), photographs with cockeyed perspective. Says he of his devices: "Their effectiveness begins to wear off when everybody does it. . . . If you are different, you are all right." In a field notorious for its vicious circle of mutual imitation, Agha usually manages...
...ambassador, not an art director, was Agha's early ambition. A dark, widish man, son of a landowner and tobacco magnate who had kept his Turkish citizenship, he was born 43 years ago at Nikolaev in the Russian Ukraine. In 1917 he was studying at the Polytechnic Institute in Petrograd, became successively a civil servant under Kerensky, a painter of party posters under Lenin. Five years later, while clerking in his brother's delicatessen shop in Paris, he drifted into designing, soon grew successful in the field of elegant advertisement...
...Agha's doctorate is a courtesy title conferred upon him in Berlin, where doctors are as common as colonels in Kentucky. A famed photographer and storyteller, he also plays chess extremely well, for a man without a beard. Outwardly he is as hard-boiled as a Hemingway hero, underneath as sentimental. Symbol of his wry self-depreciation of arts at which he excels is his poem, The Hippocratic Oath of a Photographer...
...paradise but a woman's world, "governed with the utmost deliberation and care, not by a man at all, but by a woman." That was the Sultan Valide, the Sultan's mother. No. 2 was neither man nor woman, but the Kislar Agha, the Chief Black Eunuch, "the most feared, and consequently the most bribed, official in the whole of the Ottoman Empire...