So Many of Them

Abraham Lincoln said: "God must have loved the common people, he made so many of them."

Phineas Taylor Barnum said: "There's one born every minute."

In choosing an inscription for the new building that is to house their New York Daily News, gumchewers' tabloid with the largest U. S. circulation (1.300.000 ).* Publishers Joseph Medill Patterson and Robert Rutherford McCormick turned to Lincoln, not to Barnum. Curious crowds stood in front of the new News building last week, eyeing a procession of laborers, beggars, children, flappers, photographers marching in light relief across the building's grey-green granite facade over the tabloidally cryptic excerpt: "He made so manv of them."

Martin's Mentor

Crowell Publishing Co. employes found an announcement on their bulletin board one morning last week, which read: "The Company has sold The Mentor to the World Traveler Magazine Corp. -- George R. Martin, publisher./- They will assume the publishing of The Mentor, beginning with the June 1930 issue. We have become convinced that The Mentor will have a much better opportunity if handled by a publisher equipped to take care of the smaller units. Here we are fully and thoroughly geared up to handle large units and it has become difficult to give The Mentor the necessary small unit attention. We feel that Mr. Martin and his organization are equipped to continue The Mentor successfully."

Although Crowell had owned The Men tor since 1920, it was not until last autumn that it was resolved to dress the magazine up and try to make it sell. Founded in 1913, the earliest known Mentor was :a weekly. Each issue was devoted to one particular cultural subject--art, travel, letters. Foliowise, it also contained several loose-leaf rotogravure art reproductions. Then it became a semimonthly, then a monthly. Last September it fell into the capable hands of Hugh Anthony Leamy, a onetime associate editor of Collier's.

Editor Leamy decided to keep his editorial matter--essays, fiction, humor-- consistent with the oldtime Mentor, but to deck out the material with capable, sometimes racy, illustration. Although the magazine's circulation reached 85,000, it became apparent that it would never pull in harness with its whopping big Crowell team-mates--Woman's Home Companion, Collier's, The Country Home (onetime Farm & Fireside), The American Magazine -- whose combined circulation is over 8,500,000.

To World Traveler, the Mentor went lock, stock & barrel--with the exception of Editor Leamy. Henceforth he will work for Hearst's American Weekly, Sunday supplement whose circulation is greater than that of any other periodically printed matter (over 6,000,000).

Publisher Martin contemplates fusing his old magazine with his new, placing the amalgam under the direction of World Traveler's Editor Charles P. Norcross, now junketing in the Orient. Because World Traveler has about one-fourth of its stablemate's distribution, and because when two magazines combine one inevitably swallows the other, publishers guessed that the ever-mutating Mentor would be the one to endure.

Gossip Merger

Every self-disrespecting U. S. city has a tattle magazine. Usually it is ambiguously guised as a compendium of smartset goings-on. In Philadelphia it is the Town Crier; in Boston the Bostonian. Indiscreet St. Louis socialites dread the Censor; incautious Kansas citizens the Independent. But the happy hunting grounds of the gossip-magazine publisher are Manhattan and Washington. With the announcement: last week that the Club Fellow & Washington Mirror had been bought by the owners of the Taller & American Sketch, it became apparent that Windsor Publishing Corp. had its field almost completely in control. Only the 52-year-old roue Town Topics (weekly) remained in competition.

Club Fellow has been out of publication for two months. Under its new owners it will become fatter, will be printed on heavier stock. Artist Alberto Vargas, who once painted the portraits of 25 glittering Ziegfeld showgirls in 25 days, will do the covers. Editor John C. Schemm hopes to have Club Fellow bursting with wit, humor, new gossip, sport. Douglas Brinkley. musicomedy skitster, cousin of Nell Brinkley who draws baby-faced beauties for Hearstpapers, will conduct a column of Broadway chitchat.

*World's largest in English: the London Daily Mail (2,000,000).

/- Not to be confused with George Martin, one-time (1918--29) editor of Crowell's Farm & Fireside.

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