The first Stag magazine, published by Leeds Publishing Corp., beginning with vol. 1, #1 (June 1937), was a 25-cent, 96-page, digest subtitled "A Magazine for Men" and which included articles and stories by such writers as Carleton Beals, Elsa Maxwell, Bernard Sobel, and Hendrik Willem van Loon. It covered a range of topics, including literature, music, sports, and theater, along with stories on male-female relationships, sexual issues, and such topics as striptease.
A second volume, published by Official Com. Inc. and edited by Noah Sarlat, appeared circa 1951 as a 25-cent, 82-page, standard-sized men's adventure magazine. This version, containing ostensibly "true-life" fiction of men in wartime or in rugged adventure mode, continued through at least volume 22 in 1971, by which time it had published by Martin Goodman's related company, Atlas Magazines Inc., and Magazine Management Co., Inc., by which time the cover price had been raised to 50 cents.
Goodman also published the annual publication Stag Annual, starting in 1964.
Writer Dorothy Gallagher reminisced in 1998 that by the early 1960s, when Magazine Management occupied the second floor at 60th Street and Madison Avenue, "...magazines were produced the way Detroit produced cars. I worked on the fan-magazine line. On the other side of a five-foot partition was the romance-magazine line. And across a corridor were the financial staples of the organization, the men's magazines — Stag, For Men Only, Male — for which, at one time or another, Mario Puzo, Bruce Jay Friedman, David Markson, Mickey Spillane and Martin Cruz Smith wrote, until they became too exalted and rich to do it anymore." Cover illustrators included Frank Soltesz.
Stag transitioned to become a men's pornographic magazine, published by Goodman's son Charles "Chip" Goodman at Magazine Management's successor company, Swank Publications. The publishing group Magna bought Stag and its sister publication Swank from that company in 1993.
