NEW YORK. It is one of the more improbable success stories of the internet age, when print publications are widely supposed to be dinosaurs biding their time until on-line content crushes them like a rogue asteroid and makes them extinct. Real Simple, launched in 2000, boasts over two million readers for its monthly fare of decorating, fashion and cooking advice designed to make the lives of its female readers simpler.
There’s just one complication; publisher Time Inc. recently received a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers for the Alabama Home for the Feeble Minded, who threatened to sue for infringing the trademark associated with their newsletter, which is also called “Real Simple.”
“If some fancy New York company wants to start a new magazine that’s fine with us, just don’t use our name,” said Darrell Lee Suggins, head groundskeeper of the 400-person facility in Switchback, Alabama. “You’d think if they were so smart they’d at least get the grammar right and call theirs ‘Really Simple.’”
Decorate your cell on a budget!
The original Real Simple has been published since 1916 and includes features such as the Color of the Month. “We put in a page that’s all one color, cause folks here like to look at pretty things,” says editor Marlin Ebersol. “It’s a low-cost feature–we’ve been running brown since 1956.”
Really Real Simple
Lifestyle articles are popular, with the August issue bearing the teaser headline “Crank Up the Fun With a Frontal Lobotomy!” “I guess our readers are similar to that other magazine’s,” says Warden Omar Young, Jr., who doubles as sports editor. “They want to know how to keep things simple and pleasant, so they don’t get moody and depressed.”
Frontal lobotomy: “This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me.”
The Alabama magazine takes particular pride in its coverage of depictions of the feeble-minded in the arts, and has run features on Boo Radley from Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Lonnie Grinnup from William Faulkner’s “Intruders in the Dust.”
Boo Radley
“That other Real Simple, they’re not as highbrow as we are,” says editor Ebersol. “We’re more into Southern Gothic literature, they tend to focus on toenail polish and hors d’oeuvres.”
Many people have asked me if I have had a lobotomy. I would like to set the record straight. My lobes are fine and they are still in my head — somewhere.
Real complicated! Lawyers??