About Holiday

Holiday

Holiday was an American travel magazine published by the Curtis Publishing Company from 1946 to 1977. Based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Curtis had its headquarters, it grew from a postwar experiment into one of the most admired magazines in the United States, reaching a circulation of more than one million at its height. Holiday was famous for two things at once: the literary quality of its writing, commissioned from many of the best-known authors of the day, and the freedom it gave leading photographers and artists, on generous budgets, to interpret a place in pictures as they saw fit. When Curtis sold the title in 1977 it was merged with the rival magazine Travel to form Travel Holiday. A separate, Paris-based revival of the Holiday name began in 2014.

A Postwar Launch by Curtis Publishing

Curtis Publishing, the Philadelphia house behind The Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies' Home Journal, launched Holiday in 1946, just as the Second World War ended and American travel was about to be transformed. Demobilized servicemen had seen the world; airlines, highways, and rising incomes were about to let civilians follow them. Curtis judged that a large-format, richly illustrated magazine devoted entirely to travel could sell both the dream and the practical romance of going places. The magazine's headquarters were in the Philadelphia area, and its early years were promising but unremarkable. The transformation came when editorship passed to Ted Patrick, a former advertising man whose taste and showmanship turned Holiday into an editorial showcase rather than a service magazine, a distinction that defined it for the rest of its life.

Ted Patrick and the Editorial Formula

Under editor Ted Patrick, Holiday adopted a formula that competitors could not match: commission celebrated writers to write about places, not as guidebooks would, but as literature. Patrick paid top rates and gave writers their heads, so an assignment about a city or country became an essay, a memoir, or a piece of reportage bearing the author's unmistakable voice. Photographers received the same treatment, interpreting a subject separately from the writer and with a generous budget, so text and pictures offered two independent visions of the same place. The staff culture under Patrick was famously convivial; the son of executive editor Carl Biemiller recalled a lively cocktail-party circuit around the magazine. The formula worked commercially as well as critically: by 1961 the magazine was taking in almost ten million dollars a year in revenue, and by 1962 its circulation had climbed to just under one million, later passing that mark at its peak.

The Writers Holiday Published

The roster of Holiday contributors became a catalogue of mid-century letters. Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, James Michener, Lawrence Durrell, Colette, Alfred Bester, and Arthur C. Clarke all appeared in its pages. Capote published his autobiographical essay about Brooklyn Heights in the magazine. The single most famous Holiday commission was E. B. White's long essay on New York City, written for the magazine in 1949. White's stepson, Roger Angell, then worked at Holiday, and the connection helped produce a piece that was soon reissued as a gift book and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and that later critics have ranked among the finest essays ever written about Manhattan; after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was republished again as a tribute to the city. Holiday's willingness to buy such work, at length and at top fees, is central to its legend.

Photography, Art, and Frank Zachary

If Patrick supplied the literary ambition, art director Frank Zachary supplied the visual identity. Under Zachary, Holiday became a showcase for the best magazine photography and illustration in America, with bold layouts and covers now regarded as classics of mid-century design. Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed Paris and other cities for the magazine; Slim Aarons captured the glamour of resort and leisure travel around the world. Illustrators and artists such as Al Hirschfeld and Ludwig Bemelmans contributed drawings of places and personalities. Photographers were briefed loosely and trusted, an expensive policy that produced portfolios unlike anything in competing travel titles, which tended to subordinate pictures to text. Design historians continue to reproduce Holiday covers and spreads as exemplars of the period, and the magazine's visual archive was substantial enough to anchor a large illustrated history of the title published decades after its death.

The Golden Age of Travel in Print

Holiday's peak coincided with what is now remembered as the golden age of both air travel and magazine publishing. At its early-1960s height it sold close to a million copies a year while the jet age was remaking tourism, and for many middle-class readers it was the principal window onto foreign places in an era before cheap flights, television travel programming, and the internet. Pamela Fiori, who began her publishing career at Holiday in 1968 as a fact checker and later edited Travel + Leisure and Town & Country, has argued that no travel magazine before it offered anything similar, and that none since could match its combination of size, breadth, and depth. That judgment reflects the economics of the time: advertising-rich, large-circulation general magazines could subsidize literary travel writing in a way later, narrower titles could not.

The Crisis of 1964

Ted Patrick died suddenly in 1964, and his death broke the magazine's spell. Don A. Schanche of The Saturday Evening Post succeeded him as editor, but relations between the Holiday staff and Curtis management deteriorated over the magazine's direction. In protest, four senior editors resigned: editorial director Harry Sions, Frank Zachary, executive editor Albert H. Farnsworth, and pictures editor Louis F. V. Mercier. A large group of the magazine's writers, artists, and photographers took out a full advertisement in The New York Times saluting the four as good editors, an extraordinary public gesture that announced to the industry that Holiday's golden inner circle had dispersed. The magazine continued for another thirteen years, but its identity as the writers' and photographers' showcase dated from the Patrick-Zachary era, and it never fully recovered that standing.

Decline, Sale, and the Travel Holiday Merger

Through the 1970s Holiday's circulation suffered along with the rest of the Curtis empire and the big general-interest magazines generally. Television had taken the mass audience, postal and production costs had risen, and the travel market was fragmenting into specialized titles. In 1977 Curtis sold Holiday to the publisher of Travel, a competing travel magazine with roots going back to 1901. The two titles were merged into a single publication, Travel Holiday, and Holiday as a standalone magazine ended after thirty-one years. Travel Holiday itself passed to the Reader's Digest Association in 1986 and then to Hachette Filipacchi in 1996, before closing with its June 2003 issue. The original Holiday's ISSN, 0018-3520, belongs to the Curtis-era title that collectors and libraries still catalogue.

The Paris Relaunch of 2014

The Holiday name returned in April 2014, when the Paris-based art direction studio Atelier Franck Durand relaunched it as a bi-annual magazine conceived in Paris and written in English, with Marc Beaugé as editor-in-chief and Franck Durand as creative director. The revival, which began its numbering at issue 373, treated the original magazine as a heritage brand: its first issue was devoted to the year 1969 and to Ibiza, and it announced ambitions extending to a café and a clothing line. The new Holiday was a fashion-and-culture object rather than a mass-circulation travel monthly, and its connection to the Curtis magazine was one of name, spirit, and design reverence rather than of continuing ownership or staff. Directory users should therefore distinguish the American Holiday of 1946 to 1977 from the French bi-annual that borrowed its name.

Legacy and the 2019 History

Holiday's afterlife has been unusually well documented. In 2019 Rizzoli published Pamela Fiori's Holiday: The Best Travel Magazine That Ever Was, the first book devoted to the title, with an afterword by Franck Durand, reproducing its covers, layouts, photography, and journalism and setting them in the context of the jet age and the rise of Madison Avenue advertising. Librarians, design archives, and collectors preserve complete runs, and individual issues, especially those with notable covers or the White essay, trade steadily. The magazine's legacy in the trade is as a standard of commissioning: it showed that travel writing could be literature, that photographers deserved an independent brief, and that a mass magazine could be an art object. Later American travel magazines worked in its shadow, even as the economics that had sustained it disappeared.