This Old House Now a New Magazine

Lucky is the magazine that starts out with a demonstrated potential audience of 10 million people. That’s how many watch “This Old House,” public television’s fix-it-up show, which next week will spawn This Old House magazine.

To make the connection to public TV’s highest-rated series as clear as a newly installed thermopane window, the May/June issue features host Steve Thomas and master carpenter Norm Abrams on the cover. Several articles, as well as a pull-out set of architect’s drawings, are tied to a Napa Valley farmhouse undergoing renovation on recent broadcasts.

Like the 16-year-old “House,” the magazine presents a lot of shiny hardware and other guy-oriented matters, such as the salvaging of century-old logs from muddy river bottoms. At the same time, the new mag has the airy design and high-tone beauty of Martha Stewart Living, as evidenced by the new publication’s evocative pictorial of porches.

The resemblance is no accident. Both are properties of Time Publishing Ventures Inc., a magazine-development division of Time Inc., and This Old House aims to reach many of the same women who are drawn to Stewart’s boundless array of homemaking and gardening ideas.

“It blew us away that nearly half the viewers of ‘This Old House’ are female,” said Eric G. Thorkilsen, 44, president and publisher of the new magazine and the founding publisher of Martha Stewart Living. “The feeling of Norm and the other people connected with the show is that it’s a couples’ show.”

The editor is Isolde Motley. Among her first contributors are John S. Saladyga, a home-repair writer for Newsday, and gardening writer Ken Druse.

As part of the development plan, the 500,000 copies that go on sale Monday are labeled “test issue.” This choice of words allows Thorkilsen and company to assess the initial newsstand response, subscription orders from insert cards and returns on a direct mailing (also planned for next week) before proceeding with a full-blown launch. As the publisher put it, “We reserve the right to publish one more time or a hundred more times.”

This Old House is shooting for the latter by tapping all of the so-called synergy at its disposal. Full-page ads for the magazine will appear in other Time Inc. publications, including Sports Illustrated, People and Time. In addition, announcements about the mag are being appended to broadcasts of “This Old House,” which numbers KCET-TV among its 315 affiliate stations.

Time Publishing Ventures is bringing out the magazine under an agreement with WGBH Boston, which produces “This Old House.”

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Read All About Them: The scheduled Wednesday release of “Panther,” a dramatic film about the early years of the Black Panther Party, has signaled the publication and reissue of several related books.

Among the new titles are Melvin Van Peebles’ “Panther” (Thunder’s Mouth Press), the novel on which the author also based his screenplay for the film, and “Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panthers and the Story Behind the Film” (Newmarket Press), written by Van Peebles’ son, Mario, (director of “Panther”), Ula Y. Taylor and J. Tarika Lewis.

Two books by the late Huey P. Newton, a founder of the Black Panthers, are being reissued by Writers and Readers Publishing Inc. Originally published 20 years ago, they are the autobiography “Revolutionary Suicide” and “To Die for the People,” a collection of writings and speeches edited by Toni Morrison.

In addition, “The Shadow of the Panther,” Hugh Pearson’s history of the party, has been reprinted in an oversize paperback edition by Addison-Wesley.

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Afterwords: John Berendt, whose “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (Random House) has been on bestseller lists for more than a year, returns to the colorful setting of his book, Savannah, Ga., for a piece about the fabled (and now much-visited) Mercer House. It appears in May’s Architectural Digest.

* Paul D. Colford is a columnist for Newsday. His column is published Fridays.