Press: Twice-Told Tales

Two barometers of a new magazine’s success are its subscribers and its imitators. Golden Book Magazine, started by Review of Reviews Corp. in 1925, soon had 165,000 of the first, four of the second. Designed as a sophisticated reprint of fiction classics of the past, it seemed to find a cosy niche in public fancy, had in culture-soaked Henry Wysham Lanier, son of Southern Poet Sidney Lanier, an editor well equipped to keep it there.

But when his brother Charles withdrew financial support from the magazine in 1928, Editor Lanier left. There followed a long, vague tinkering with Golden Book’s editorial policy, a steady decline in its subscribers. The magazine changed editors four times, page size twice. Its editorial formula wavered to include radical political speeches, varying proportions of contemporary stories and, of late, heavily Rabelaisian fiction. Advertising management was equally unsteady, equally botched. By 1935 these faults had cut the subscriptions to 53,000.

Meanwhile, Author Francis Rufus Bellamy, a onetime executive editor of The New Yorker, had conceived a variation of the Golden Book formula, produced it last May in Fiction Parade—a slight magazine reprinting current fiction. Last week it had only 30,000 subscribers, but it had one less rival. Proudly Editor Bellamy announced that, beginning October, his magazine will reprint old classics along with new, will carry no advertising, will be particularly attentive to poetry and art, will be named Fiction Parade & Golden Book.