#time inc.

Victor Burgin, "US 77," 1977.

From this roundup of Burgin's work published in the Guardian in 2020.

The Last Days of Time Inc.

An oral history of how the pre-eminent media organization of the 20th century ended up on the scrap heap.

It was once an empire. Now it is being sold for parts.

Time Inc. began, in 1922, with a simple but revolutionary idea hatched by Henry R. Luce and Briton Hadden. The two men, graduates of Yale University, were rookie reporters at The Baltimore News when they drew up a prospectus for something called a “news magazine.” After raising $86,000, Mr. Hadden and Mr. Luce quit their jobs. On March 3, 1923, they published the first issue of Time: The Weekly News-Magazine.

In 1929, the year of Mr. Hadden’s sudden death, Mr. Luce started Fortune. In 1936, he bought a small-circulation humor publication, Life, and transformed it into a wide-ranging, large-format weekly. Later came Sports Illustrated, Money, People and InStyle. By 1989, with more than 100 publications in its fold, as well as significant holdings in television and radio, Time Inc. was rich enough to shell out $14.9 billion for 51 percent of Warner Communications, thus forming Time Warner.

If you’re about to go door-to-door selling HBO and cable television subscriptions, you need to have your facts straight. You need to be able to answer questions like “How are the programs transmitted?” and “Can you install it in my den?”

If you think you’re up for the task, try out this set of questions from a workbook written for new HBO sales representatives in the early 1970s. At that time, HBO was just beginning to expand its reach and the idea of a pay TV service was new to many potential customers.

HBO. Question and answer booklet. circa 1974. Time Inc. Records. New-York Historical Society.