Nothing in the recent antics of American publishing has been quite as spectacular, or quite as revealing, as the swift and ignominious collapse of the new Vanity Fair just as the magazine’s third issue was reaching disgruntled subscribers in the last week of April. It was already apparent in February, when the inaugural (March) issue made its appearance, that something had gone seriously wrong with this project to revive a magazine that had become something of a myth in publishing circles since it suspended publication nearly half a century ago. With the second issue in hand in late March, all curiosity and suspense shifted from the magazine itself—which was clearly a flop—to whatever strategy its owners, the Condé Nast organization, might devise to save some face and salvage what it could from the wreckage of the operation. The end came on April 26 with the announcement that Leo Lerman would replace Richard Locke as the editor of Vanity Fair, and a statement the next day by S. I. Newhouse, Jr., the chairman at Condé Nast, that the magazine would now “pursue a new approach.”

Here, plainly, was failure on a colossal scale—the kind of failure that costs a magazine’s owners not only many millions of dollars but the even more valuable, if less tangible, asset of a reputation for shrewd and far seeing judgment both in business and editorial matters. Yet the patent failure of this mighty enterprise, resulting in the ouster of its founding editor and