Esquire launches an expansive, paid digital archive to mark its 1000th issue
Esquire Classic is available online, with contributions from literary greats like Hemingway and DFW.
For its 1,000th issue, Esquire is reaching back into its storied past.
Esquire debuted in the autumn of 1933 with contributions from Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and Dashiell Hammett. Over its 82-year existence, the famed men’s magazine has featured stories from other literary heavyweights including John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer and Stephen King.
“Most people have never read the 17 or 18 F. Scott Fitzgerald stories we ran,” David Granger, the magazine’s editor in chief, told Adweek. “They’ve never read the David Foster Wallace stories that we ran.”
Now they can.
To help kick off its landmark October 2015 issue, Esquire has launched a digital archive, Esquire Classic, that will house all previous 999 issues of the magazine. The subscription product costs US$4.99 per month (with a free month to start), or $45 per year for non subscribers and $30 for current Esquire subscribers. Esquire Classic presents the old issues, page-by-page, as they were when they first ran—including classic advertisements.
“We wanted to look into ways of getting more value from the work that we do,” said Granger. “We’ve spent a lot of time over the last 82 years creating great stories and great editorial.”
Most of Esquire’s current readership was not alive in the 1930s when Fitzgerald’s stories were first published in the magazine. Granger hopes Esquire Classic will give those old stories new life for generations to come. “This is all completely fresh content to the vast majority of people,” he said.
The encyclopaedically organised 1,000th issue highlights the people, places and important events from the magazine’s 82-year history.
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