Inheritors' Year

During the year which ended last week, the Saturday Evening Post carried 1,880,932 lines of advertising which, at $8,000 a page, earned a gross advertising revenue of $26,575,599. That was bigger money than any other magazine in the world took in in 1937 and is a record surpassed only by the Post itself. At the same time the Post's weekly circulation, tirelessly solicited by 50,000 boy salesmen and 2,025 telephone & field canvassers throughout the U. S., was in excess of 3,000,000-- 157,456,000 for the year--which is more copies than any other magazine ever sold in any year anywhere. During the first ten months of the year, the man who had taken over the Post when it was a little paste-up literary journal* and by 1912 made it the biggest general magazine on earth had been in complete retirement. For the last two months he had been dead. The evidence therefore indicated that his professional heirs had done well.

George Horace Lorimer was editor of the Saturday Evening Post from 1899 to Dec. 31, 1936. He was a man who looked like a bulldog and he ran the Post from stem to stern, finally becoming president of the whole Curtis group (Post, Ladies' Home Journal, Country Gentleman) when the late Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis resigned in 1932. Last week's year-end board meeting seemed strange without Mr. Lorimer. It brought together at a dramatic moment the men (it took more than one man to succeed George Horace Lorimer) who twelve months ago took charge of the publishing giant he created almost singlehanded.

"Sales Manager." With Walter Dean (or Deane, he doesn't care which) Fuller in Mr. Lorimer's old chair as Curtis president, Vice President Fred Albert Healy rose to report (without giving money figures) on net advertising revenue--for the Post, 1.6% over 1936. "It's nothing to crow about," said homely Mr. Healy who, like most Curtis executives has not lost his Midwestern inflection, "but I can't say we feel bad, either."

Other Curtis directors, reviewing lively Mr. Healy's activities of the year as "sales manager" (his own title) of the Post, thought he might be permitted at least a small crow. Older & sportier than the run of undergraduates, Fred Healy had a legendary good time at the University of Illinois. When he left there in 1914 he sold automobile accessories for a while, in 1917 became a Country Gentleman ad solicitor out of the Chicago office. He was the first to suggest that Curtis set up headquarters in Detroit to handle the rapidly growing automobile accounts, became head of that office in 1925 and originated $10,000,000 worth of business (70% automotive) in 1928. That interested Mr. Lorimer in Mr. Healy. He was called to the New York office, a few months later to Philadelphia to be Curtis advertising director. Next year the Post began accepting cigaret ads, although the magazine has still to receive its proportionate share of the tobacco business--a circumstance which strengthens its resolve to continue excluding liquor advertising.

The Depression, radio,* rising new magazines and revitalized old ones put an end to the Post's almost monopolistic position in the weekly advertising field, ended any complacency which might have lingered around the offices on Independence Square. Last year, with more aggressive presentations, a brand-new advertising promotion department and a $1,250,000 advertising campaign in newspapers & magazines, Fred Healy went out to sell more white space than was sold in 1936. That he did so-- even by 1.6%--in a year whose last four months coincided with a business panic, he generously credits not to the Post's advertising direction, but to its editorial direction. "Reader appeal," says he, "is the first leg in any publisher's relay race. The editor is king in our shop."

Sixth Floor, Mr. Lorimer handed his editorial mantle--plus his desk and spacious corner office on the Curtis Building's sixth floor--to the man he had trained for the job for 14 years--Wesley Winans Stout. To the non-professional eye, Mr. Lorimer trained Mr. Stout so thoroughly that Mr. Lorimer's last New Year's issue and Mr. Stout's first, out last week, seem to be cut from the same cloth. Each begins with a Leyendecker cherub and ends with a Dutch Cleanser ad, and what lies between is fairly homogeneous. Nevertheless, the metamorphosis that was stirring all year long in the advertising offices downstairs has had a parallel on the sixth floor.

During 1937 the Post, under able Art Editor W. Thornton ("Pete") Martin-- who found time to write a hair-raising serial about trucking which he sold not only to the Post but to the movies-- printed its first photographic covers. It illustrated its stories and articles with the work of 15 new artists--notably that of humorous Yaleman James Williamson-- and introduced "bleed" art work (printed to edge) on inside pages, a thing old Mr. Lorimer never, never permitted. Not only did the Post print the work of 147 new-writers--outstanding among whom were incandescent young political Pundits Joe Alsop & Turner Catledge--but Associate Editor Marione V. Rhinehard, who left her job last week to get married, was spurred on by Editor Stout to uncover, among the annual 70,000 unsolicited contributions, 23 manuscripts which Mr. Stout thought good enough to print. In no previous year in the Post's history had this smothering white flood washed up more than ten printable stories or articles.

Even more significant was the turnover among Mr. Stout's eight associate editors. On New Year's Day, Graeme Lorimer, George Horace's elder son and the last Lorimer left in the Curtis Publishing Co., resigned to continue writing--with his wife --stories like After Dark, which he recently sold to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for $25,000. He and his brother retain a small holding of Curtis stock.* Ironically, with Graeme Lorimer's eyes turned toward Hollywood, a fugitive from the film colony. Merritt Hulburd, will fill his vacancy on the Post. Merritt Hulburd, Graeme Lorimer's classmate (1923) and fraternity brother (Psi U) at the University of Pennsylvania, persuaded Samuel Goldwyn to tear up his contract, which had over three years to run, so that he could return to the magazine he left six years ago. Two other associate editors taken on in 1937 are Stuart Rose, Ladies' Home Journal fiction editor who does not take office until February, and Joseph St. George Bryan III, a parsimonious Virginian who edits the "Post Scripts" page and contributed one of the smartest Post biographies of the year, 0. 0. Mclntyre's. Another Junior member of the staff is Richard Thruelsen, a onetime Army flyer, who writes ''Keeping Posted."

Solid backlogs of the editorial staff are three invaluable Lorimer legacies. Oldest in point of service is the A. W. Neall whose name for years has held the No. 2 place in the Post's masthead. Few readers know that she is a woman. Adelaide Neall, fresh out of Bryn Mawr, got into the organization by picking Graeme up when he fell off his pony at a Lorimer garden party in 1909. She handles the magazine's poetry, contacts, encourages, and makes story suggestions to most of the Post's women writers, a few men like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Every Post editor has a string of authors he cultivates, and Erdmann Neumeister Brandt's (whose brother runs the prominent literary agency of Brandt & Brandt) string includes many younger male fictioneers whom he, like Graeme Lorimer, has a knack of developing. Red of face and hair, Associate Editor Martin Sommers, who spills out topical information like a teletype, applies news sense developed on the Mew York News to conceiving and abetting articles on sport and politics.

Unwritten Recipe. Three Post editors spend one day each week in Manhattan interviewing writers, searching among book publishers' galleys and agents' piles of manuscripts for Post material. The rest of the week, from 9 to 5:15, all eight devote to reading and passing judgment on the 600 "first-class" manuscripts that come in each week from literary agents and to replying to some 90 letters apiece each day from inquiring, laudatory or abusive readers. It is an old Lorimer custom that no matter how trivial or routine the communication, it must get a personal reply from the editor or one of his associates. The carbons of the replies are then circulated to all the other members of the editorial staff.

On Monday, the staff assembles in Editor Stout's office, sits down at a Chippendale table at one end of the room and in a blank dummy of the magazine which is to reach subscribers and newsstands four weeks hence, makes up. Between fixed points--the front page, the editorial page and the Campbell's Soup ad--the nation's favorite magazine reading matter, written and bought from a year to a week before,* is arranged. A good cook needs no recipe and the Post's editors follow a make-up routine which is unstated. It is, however, inflexible within its limits: four articles, four or five fiction-pieces, editorial, Post Scripts, Keeping Posted (writers' who's who). The chief rule in selecting the stories and articles is to avoid duplication. It is not standard policy to run two like stories in one week (a Western is considered a duplicate of any costume story), or two similar articles or an article which echoes a story's scene or subject.

The people who write this material are, in spite of a continual campaign to get in new blood, a fairly constant band of professional "slick paper" magazine writers who make from $5,000 to $250,000 a year at their trade. Incorrigible highbrows criticize the Post's taboos (par for middle-class conception of decency anywhere), complain that in its non-fiction no intellectual rivers are ever set afire, in its fiction no Buddenbrooks appear among the Clarence Buddington Kellands. This is old stuff to Editor Stout's staff. Nowadays they respond simply by handing out a reprint of Bernard DeVoto's sensible piece on Writing for Money, printed in the Saturday Review last year. Nub:

''People read the magazines primarily for entertainment. There are other important reasons, too--they read to have their ideas confirmed and their emotions ratified, to have their phantasy life stimulated, and to increase their knowledge of the minor sanctions and rituals of society but first of all they want to be amused. . . .

"It necessarily follows that, though they may like to be threatened or thrilled, they do not like to be scared; that, though they may enjoy a seasoning of horror they must not be appalled or disgusted; that, though they may play with ideas, they will not wrestle with them. Satire flourishes in the slicks, but it is satire of manners. Few themes or subjects are tabooed but every subject must be treated in such a way that basic fears, disgusts, and prejudices are not roused. The 'unhappy ending,' the sole criterion of art when the Dial still lived, is a commonplace in the slicks but genuine tragedy would be as out of place there as a chorus from 'Antigone' interpolated between innings at a baseball game. . . . That fact, not the timidity or hypocrisy of editors, determines the nature of magazine fiction. . . ."

The Post's editors consider this a pretty good statement of their literary case.

Stout, W. Such is the demonstrably profitable editorial formula Mr. Lorimer left the Post. As Editor Stout has further demonstrated this year, like all editorial formulas that work, it is big enough to move around in. Mr. Lorimer also left a number of Post traditions which carry on: of paying everybody in cash, of holding elaborate fire drills, of locking everything up in a vault every night. And he left the sixth floor a time clock which is still punched by one & all--with one exception. Significantly, the card marked Stout, W. is no longer punched.

George Horace Lorimer was a genteel youth from Louisville, Ky., a preacher's son who was 26 years old and doing very well in the glue business when he turned to journalism. Wesley Winans Stout is nowhere near so complicated a personality. He is a farm mortgage broker's son who was born at Junction City, Kans.--three miles from the "geographical centre of the U. S."--and until 32 was an itinerant newspaperman. He has worked on papers from Wichita to Mexico City. Until he went to the Post in 1922 he never saved money for anything except to go some place else to see what it was like. Two of the happiest years of his life were spent just after the War as the non-working "supercargo" of Shipping Board tramp steamers. As education for editing a magazine as national as the Post, this early and extremely ungenteel footlessness could scarcely be beaten. His knowledge of the U. S. scene helped him rewrite some of the best Americana the Post printed in recent years.

Wesley Stout is also built like a bulldog, but he gives the impression of a man still unrooted to any one spot. He and his wife--a onetime fellow employe whom he married a year after going to work for the Post--have a farm house outside Philadelphia, but live a good deal of the time at a hotel near the office. Unlike the Lorimers, they take no part in Philadelphia's social life. Mrs. Stout has a daughter by a former marriage, no other children.

Before a manuscript is accepted by the Post, all its editors (except the second-class manuscript reader) read it and write comments on the envelope it comes in-- "O. K.," "Sure," "You're crazy," "Don't want it," "Revamp the lead." The final veto or acceptance is Editor Stout's. Because of office interruptions, he does most of his copyreading at home at night, consequently works almost twice the hours of anyone else on the staff. He still travels. Only a few weeks ago he got back from seeing how things were in Texas. Not at all in the Lorimer tradition are Editor Stout's fondness for horse races and beer, his convivial daily luncheons (see cut, p. 22) and handball games with the staff. But right out of old Mr. Lorimer's book is the reaching journalistic curiosity, the solid dependability and the capacity to absorb work which seem most typical of Wesley Stout. Under Wesley Stout the Post has moved no further leftward than it stood in the stand-pat days of George Horace Lorimer. Extreme partisanship, however, with regard to the current economic battle lines was much more a part of Mr. Lorimer's nature than it is of Wesley Stout's, who was probably too recently a newspaperman standing on the sidelines with a press card in his hat, to get emotionally or intellectually overexcited. But for all their differences in personality, Editor Lorimer had no deeper admirer than Editor Stout. "In an age of tenors," says Editor Stout of his predecessor, "he sang bass." Obviously Wesley Stout wants to do the same thing.

*The Saturday Evening Post was not founded by Benjamin Franklin, as blazoned from the Post's headband. Franklin died in 1790. The Post began publication, as a compendium of news and literary contributions, August 4, 1821, in a little printing shop on Philadelphia's Market Street which happened to have inherited Franklin's old hand press, a few fonts of his type and the goodwill of his defunct Pennsylvania Gazette.

*Worth noting is the fact that while the Post runs many stage and screen articles, that great entertainment medium the radio is almost never featured.

*Largest, but not controlling, interest in Curtis is the Curtis Estate, administered for Curtis and Bok heirs.

*But, under no circumstances, by formal prearrangement. The Post occasionally subsidizes a favorite author by buying a poor story and never printing it, but unlike Collier's and Liberty it maintains no stable. However, when the editors and a veteran writer talk over and agree on a piece, it is rare that it is not accepted and run.

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