Look and Learn

Look and Learn Cover page from 25 March 1972

Look and Learn was a weekly educational magazine for children published by Fleetway Publications Ltd from 1962 until 1982. It featured educational text articles that covered a wide variety of topics from volcanoes to the Loch Ness Monster.

It also featured the long running science fiction comic strip, "The Trigan Empire", by Mike Butterworth and Don Lawrence, and often adapted famous works of literature into comic-strip form, such as Lorna Doone. It also serialized works of fiction such as The First Men in the Moon. The illustrators who worked on the magazine included Fortunino Matania, John Millar Watt, Peter Jackson, John Worsley, Patrick Nicolle, Ron Embleton, Gerry Embleton, C. L. Doughty, Wilf Hardy, Dan Escott, Angus McBride, Oliver Frey, James E. McConnell, Barrie Linklater, Kenneth Lilly, Graham Coton, R. B. Davis, Severino Baraldi and Clive Uptton.

Among other things, it featured the Pen-Friends pages, a popular section where readers could make new friends overseas.

Pre-Publication History

Look and Learn was the brainchild of Leonard Matthews, the editorial director of juvenile publications at Fleetway Publications which was already publishing the long-running Children's Newspaper. An early attempt by Matthews to launch a new educational title along the lines of Italian educational magazines Conoscere and La Vita Meravigliosa had been turned down by the Board of Directors.

A British edition of Conocere was brought out in 1961 under the title Knowledge and Matthews reassessed his original proposal and approached the Board again, this time receiving the go-ahead to produce a dummy of the proposed magazine.

The dummy was put together by the firm's Experimental Art Department headed by David Roberts and Trevor Newton. David Stone, a former sub-editor with Everybody's Weekly was appointed editor and, with the dummy approved, the magazine began publication. However, before the new title reached the newsstands, John Sanders replaced Stone as editor.

Publication History

The first issue of Look and Learn was dated January 20, 1962, and contained a wide spectrum of features ranging from articles on history (Rome, the Houses of Parliament, the story of King Charles I, "The Dover Road", "From Then Till Now"), science ("Eyes on Outer Space"), geography and geology (The Grand Canyon, "The Quest for Oil"), art (Vincent van Gogh), nature ("The story of a seed", "Your Very Own Basset Hound"), literature (The Arabian Nights and its editor Sir Richard Burton) and travel ("The Children of Tokio"). The debut issue also contained the first episodes of "Three Men in a Boat" by Jerome K. Jerome and "The Children's Crusade" by Henry Treece and a feature on the founding of the World Wildlife Fund.

The first issue of the magazine sold about 700,000 copies and settled down to a regular sale of over 300,000 copies a week. The success of the magazine has been put down to the high quality of the magazine's content. Historian Steve Holland has said, "The premise of Look and Learn was to delight and inspire the imaginations of its young readers. To advance this principal, the features were clearly and briskly written and illustrated by some of the finest artists of the era resulting in a magazine of unmatched quality."

The first major change to the contents of the magazine came in 1966 when it incorporated Ranger with issue 232 (June 25, 1966). This amalgamation brought with it a number of comic strips including a translation of Asterix under the title "In the Days of Good Queen Cleo" (later reprinted in book form in a new translation as Asterix and Cleopatra) and "The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire", written by Mike Butterworth and drawn by Don Lawrence.

This amalgamation was overseen by recently appointed editor John Davies who had replaced Sanders when the latter left to edit the short-lived Ranger in 1965. Davies had previously edited The Children's Newspaper until it merged with Look and Learn (issue 173, May 8, 1965).

Davies continued the magazine with the same mixture as before (the page count of the magazine having increased from 32 pages to 36 to accommodate the additional content), as did the editors who followed him, Andy Vincent (1969-1977) and Jack Parker (1977-1982).

It was under Parker's editorship that the paper underwent a facelift with issue 844 (March 18, 1978) and celebrated its 1,000th issue (May 9, 1981). Sales had, however, been declining throughout the 1970s, a decade which had seen the price of the paper rise from 7 1/2 pence to 30 pence due to sharply increasing production costs. Price increases in the early 1980s added a further 10 pence to the weekly cost of the magazine and the editor had to admit that "we simply do not sell enough to meet the very heavy cost of producing a magazine of the quality of Look and Learn and we are therefore unable to continue publication."

Look and Learn folded with issue 1049, dated April 17, 1982.

Revival of Look and Learn

In November 2004, the rights to the magazine were purchased by Look and Learn Magazine Ltd. who have subsequently created an extensive website dedicated to the magazine, including a picture gallery with over 16,000 images.

A reissue of Look and Learn containing the best features and strips is now available by subscription. The first new issue appeared in January 2007 and is due to run fortnightly for 48 issues.

External links

• Look and Learn Magazine