A LITTLE OLD MAGAZINE.(The Paris Review celebrates 50th birthday)

The anticipation of a fiftieth birthday need not evoke a sense of dread--especially, as the ancient wisdom suggests, when one ponders the alternative. Playboy and The Paris Review, periodicals whose subscriber lists don't much overlap but which have in common that their respective founding editors, Hugh Hefner and George Plimpton, are still on the masthead (and, in the case of Plimpton--who doesn't spend all day in his pajamas but does live above the store--still in the building), turn fifty this year. Playboy, which, its chronological age notwithstanding, is contentedly trapped in a perpetual post-adolescence, will publish its commemorative issue in December, with a long, arousing buildup that begins officially this month, as a twenty-city search for the golden-anniversary Playmate gets under way. There will also be a jazz festival at the Hollywood Bowl in June; an auction at Christie's in New York of art work from the corporate collection ("hundreds of Neimans, Vargases, Warhols, and others,"according to Hefner's personal publicist, plus photographs filigreed with "Hef's own critical remarks about how to make the images better”); a threeday autumn Playboy Weekend at a hotel in Las Vegas; an as yet undefined "major event in New York City”; and a more frolicsome than usual New Year's Eve party at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, with a guest list, traditionally limited to four hundred philosopher-sybarites, expanded to seven hundred.

For budgetary as well as aesthetic reasons, the celebration for The Paris Review, a quarterly with a circulation of about ten thousand, will be rather more restrained. The only public festivities will take place next month--a panel discussion, at the New York Public Library, devoted to "little magazines,"and an Off Broadway evening of selected readings by actors. Choreographing the latter event will require a heroic distillation of fifty years' worth of fiction, poetry, essays, and interviews--published work culled from a flood of material that, in recent times, has averaged twenty thousand annual submissions. Lots of paper, lots of words.

Several varieties of mystique have attached to The Paris Review over the years: its genesis as a clever adventure by a group of shabby-genteel young expatriates (Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, William Styron, and Donald Hall, among others); its art-for-art's-sake allure for writers, poets, and artists willing to overlook that they were getting paid very little (though they did get invited to parties at the hip-literati crowd's version of a Playboy Mansion--Plimpton's book-stuffed town house, overlooking the East River); and the whole enterprise's genius for staying precariously afloat (largely a function of Plimpton's talent for attracting benefactors willing to assume the title of "publisher”--the first was the son of the Aga Khan, whom Plimpton invited to come aboard as they happened to be fleeing the bulls in Pamplona--and rescue the magazine from its frequent flirtations with insolvency).

The Paris Review's most recent fund-raising venture, though it wasn't specifically planned as such, is a fiftieth-anniversary anthology. Unavoidably, it is a big book--seven hundred and sixty-eight ...