So Young to Die

Like everything else, the cost of putting out magazines had skyrocketed in the first two postwar years--and so had magazine mortality. Several big "X" (for experimental) projects had been quietly stowed away on the back of the shelf, and a good many marginal titles had been quietly junked by their publishers. Last week, adless, pocket-sized Pageant, one of the likelier-looking war babies, was dying in its handsome crib.

Publisher Alex L. Hillman started it in November 1944, to add a touch of prestige to his profitable, hurdy-gaudy string (comic books, Real Romances, Crime Detective, etc.). Pageant went out for good bylines, good pictures and no reprints. But neither Eugene Lyons, its first editor, nor Vernon Pope, its last (since May 1945), had the paper to justify promoting Pageant into competition with The Reader's Digest or Coronet. In the past 18 months, Pageant (circ. 270,000) has lost $400,000 for Publisher Hillman, mainly because of rising printing and paper costs. Pope and most of his staff left last week. Hillman planned to use up their "bank" of articles in three bimonthly issues. Then, barring happy accident, Pageant would give up the ghost.

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This week Liberty, another chronic money-loser, tried a new tack to get out of the red tide and into the black. Except for a couple of war years, it had gone profitless under Founders Joseph M. Patterson and Robert R. McCormick. And it had failed to pay its way for their successors, Bernarr Macfadden and Paul Hunter. A weekly until last February and a fortnightly since, Liberty (circ. 1,600,000) will now be a 10-c- monthly.

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