Word: cond
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Condé Nast brings back Vanity Fair-but not entirely to life...
...magazines, few are recalled as wistfully by readers as Vanity Fair, the raffish, snooty cultural monthly that blossomed in the optimism of 1914 and withered in the middle of the Depression in 1936. Vanity Fair never reached more than 99,000 buyers, and it reportedly lost money for Publisher Condé Nast (1873-1942) in all save one of its 22 years. But it featured writing by Thomas Wolfe, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Parker and P.G. Wodehouse and photographs by Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz. In an indulgent appraisal in 1960, Cleveland Amory contended that Vanity Fair had been "America...
...memory was particularly strong at the Condé Nast company; it is the nation's sixth largest magazine group (1982 advertising revenues: $180 million), and has been a leader in an industry-wide trend toward seeking the affluent, educated readers whom advertisers covet. Condé Nast is noted primarily for magazines about fashion and fitness (Vogue, Gentlemen's Quarterly, Self), but company executives believed that a cultural magazine could have even greater appeal "upscale" and invested as much as $15 million to develop the idea. Next week 732,000 copies of the first Vanity Fair in 47 years...
...Condé Nast officials insisted when announcing the revival: "You will not find a more handsome, readable magazine in America." That boast prompted high, perhaps unreachable, expectations. The first issue is certainly lavish (290 glossy pages) and diverse. To accompany an entire short novel by Gabriel García Márquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature, the magazine bought rights to a dozen new paintings and drawings from celebrated fellow Colombian Fernando Botero. There are lively, offbeat articles: Gore Vidal reporting from the Gobi Desert, Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould speculating on why .400 hitters have disappeared...
...room Park Avenue penthouse or his vast Long Island estate, functions at which he never seemed quite at ease. During the 1920s and '30s, when his magazines-Vogue, Vanity Fair, House & Garden-were setting standards of taste and fashion for a newly assertive America, Condé Nast was one of the most elegant figures...