Epidemic

A man who described himself as "Chief of the Astrologers' Guild of New York," appeared last week in Albany, N. Y., to work for the passage of a state law to license "genuine astrologers." He said he wanted to "drive out pretenders and charlatans who for 25-c- will deliver a readymade horoscope." Legislators, well aware that pretenders and charlatans abound, sympathized. But they wondered how to tell a charlatan from an astrologer.

A good test would be to have all self-styled astrologers predict that week in the future which will witness another such epidemic as swept the world last week--an epidemic of buying and selling newspapers.

Bee. Ask a parochial bystander to name you a newspaper in Galveston, St. Louis, Butte, Jacksonville or either Portland. His face will go blank. Ask him to name you one in Omaha and out will buzz: "The Bee." One of the oldest newspapers west of the Mississippi, the Bee has stung itself into the U. S. folk-consciousness not only by its bumbling name but by appropriate industry. That its industry might reap greater rewards, it last week (in the person of Publisher Nelson B. Updike) bought out and absorbed its chief competitor, the Omaha Daily News, 28-year-old member of the Clover Leaf Syndicate.

Telegram. Ask a Midwesterner who owns the New York Telegram. He will most likely guess Hearst, then give up. But he knows all about the Scripps-Howard newspapers. There are 25 of them scattered from Washington and Baltimore to San Diego and San Francisco. He will feel pretty certain that the Scripps-Howard chain has no link in Manhattan. Up to last week that was true. Then Chairman Roy W. Howard of the Scripps-Howard organization announced that he had bought the New York Telegram, for a price not named, from the man who only lately acquired it (together with the N. Y. Sun), William T. Dewart, longtime henchman of its late publisher, Frank A. Munsey (TIME, Oct. 11) To the Telegram's 200,000 readers, Mr. Howard, smart resident of New York, said: ". . . No radical changes . . . our nationwide experience . . ."

Register-Tribune. Of all the potent young men of Iowa, none is more potent than John Cowles, Harvard '21. He frees his father of all the heavy work connected with publishing the Des Moines Register & Evening Tribune. Last week it was his name, not his father's, that was signed to a statement announcing that the Register-Tribune had bought and would absorb the local, competing Capital. Price: half a million.

Sentinel. Journalists ejaculated last summer when Publisher Frank Ernest Gannett of several newspapers, notably the Rochester Times-Union, in the lush butter & egg, and grape juice counties of New York, reached far out and bought the Sentinel, largest daily in Winston-Salem, N. C. (TIME, Aug. 23). That twin town, that tobacco-boom town, must certainly be a "comer" if Frank Ernest Gannett was goin? in there with a newspaper, they thought. But either he was mistaken, or it was too fast a boom town for even Frank Ernest Gannett to keep up with, or he made a good turnover, or he just changed his mind, because last week the Sentinel was resold, to Publisher Owen Moon of the Winston-Salem Journal. Possessed of the Sentinel, an afternoon sheet, Publisher Moon extinguished a small Star he had been publishing every evening.

Matin. Paris and Berlin hummed with rumors that August Thyssen, German steel tsar, was trying to buy the oldtime nationalist Paris Matin, edited by Propagandist Stephane Lauzanne, famed in the U. S.