One of the unluckier men in American history is Wilmer McLean, whose land was destroyed during the Civil War in two successive battles at Bull Run.
   Tired of his lousy luck, McLean moved 200 miles away and for two years he lived aloof from the conflict--until the day he had his finest table commandeered by Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant for the signing of the Confederacy's surrender. McLean had moved to Virginia's Appomattox Courthouse.
   Such trivial tidbits might seem the stuff cooked up to stump aspiring “Jeopardy!” contestants.
   In fact this and other interesting items come from the pages of Mental Floss Magazine, which bears the tag line “Feel Smart Again.” 
   If reading the one-year-old Mental Floss feels like you've stumbled in on a late-night dorm room philosophy session, you are to be forgiven. The idea for the magazine was hatched at Duke University, according to editor Will Pearson.
     “We wished there was a magazine that could deliver our education in monthly installments,” he jokes.
    But Mental Floss is not a humor magazine, despite what its name might suggest.
   “The Mental Floss concept is that there’s a wealth of knowledge out there that people want access to, and they would like it delivered in quick and easy bits,” says Pearson.
   “It’s a blend of trivia and knowledge you feel like you should have learned.”
   With that in mind Pearson and his pals launched the magazine last spring and quickly got national distribution, with some impressive results. The first issue sold 70 percent of its copies on the newsstand, almost three times the 23 percent sell-through for first issues of new titles.
    The section that best exemplifies the magazine is a department called “Scatter Brained,” which is 10 straight pages of non-stop blurbs based loosely around a theme, such as “food” or “kids.”
   For example, on the topic of "Food for the Heart": "The roots of kissing begin with man's ancient quest for salt. Researchers point out that early cave dwellers were the first to discover the presence of salt on sweat-covered faces, so they took to licking the salty mugs of their mates
and loved ones."
   Each issue of Mental Floss has a separate theme, a conceit that starts to stretch as the writers touch on literally any topic in the course of taking the bullet point to new educational heights.
   Another regular feature involves taking something in current events, such as the Federal Reserve, and having an expert give an accessible account of what exactly it does.
   “We focus on topics that people may be hearing about but don’t really understand-for example, right now we would write about Hezbollah, and try to do it in an unbiased way,” says Pearson.
   “Other educational magazines, like Civilization or Smithsonian, have a very scholarly feel to them,” says Pearson. “While we want to appeal to intellectuals, we also want to appeal to the average person who just wants to feel smarter. We try to give it a much quicker and fresher feel.”
   Mental Floss is still finding its legs as a magazine. The graphic design, for example, is just beginning to show signs of evolving from dorm room-style cut-and-paste.
   But Pearson has ambitious plans to turn Mental Floss into an across-media brand.
   “We’re very close to a partnership that would boost our circulation to a couple hundred thousand in the first year, with a national association,” says Pearson. That would be up from the circulation of 35,000, plus 5,000 subscribers, that the magazine has acquired in a year’s time.
   Mental Floss is soon starting work on a book with publisher HarperCollins, to be released around late 2004.
   In addition, Pearson says that Mental Floss is pitching the idea of a “Mental Floss Minute” as a small syndicated program to radio stations.
   Voicing for the trivia minute would be provided by Victoria Jackson, the former “Saturday Night Live” cast member who specialized in dim-witted characters.   
    Jackson approached Mental Floss after reading an article about the startup.
   Pearson says that the expansion plans won’t take away from the dorm-room tone of the magazine: “There’s a certain quality to the magazine, a very casual style, that we don’t expect to change.”
   While everyone on the Mental Floss masthead has had to hold down separate day jobs this past year, the title is currently setting up a new office in Birmingham, Ala., and will employ eight full-time staffers in cities across the country, though in true startup fashion many of them won’t be drawing a salary until early next year.
    Pearson says that Mental Floss has plans to move from quarterly to bimonthly publishing early next year, in a step that will enable the magazine to provide more timely explanations of current events.
   “It’s tough when people ask what has been my favorite article because this has been a selfish endeavor,” Pearson says. “Most of the things in the magazine are things we’d like to know about.”

June 3, 2002 © 2002 Media Life

-David Moore is a staff writer for Media Life.

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