Collegiana

From College Humor's offices in Chicago's North La Salle street last week issued three breathless announcements:

1) Short, plump, slow-spoken Publisher John Marcus Lansinger had a new son, John Marcus Jr., described as the publisher's "second issue," his first being Joan, 4.

2) College Humor, having reduced its price from 35-c- to 25-c- with the August issue, was reducing advertising rates 10%.

3) Vivacious Patricia Reilly ("Pat") Foster was appointed editrix to succeed Editor Harold Norling ("Swanie") Swanson who resigned June i to become story editor of RKO films in Hollywood.

College Humor clung to the 35-c- price in the face of the Depression long after Cosmopolitan came down. Although Cosmopolitan's circulation rose only 20,000 with the price cut, College Humor was forced to follow suit. Its own circulation, which on some issues had soared as high as 350,000, dropped to an average of 180,000 last year. In December it was 142,000. Two prime reasons:1) College students, with trouble enough paying school bills, hesitate to spend the price of a meal for magazine amusement; 2) Ballyhoo, at 15-c- made deep inroads.

Small, shorthaired, smart-looking Editrix Foster, 31, has been sitting in the editorial chair for six months, since outgoing Editor Swanson took leave of absence to try his hand at the film business. She is "the kind of woman editor who can tie up loose ends." Her first job, in 1921, was in the advertising department of Bookman, under Stanley Marshall Rinehart Jr.; her next, as assistant to Editor John Chipman Farrar. Farrar & Rinehart later published her first novel, Big Business Girl, co-authored by Editor Swanson. After Bookman was sold Mrs. Foster worked for the George H. Doran Co.. selling film and serial rights of their books. Her first sale to the films was Dubose Heyward's Porgy, which was never produced. As a literary agent she cultivated the business of "meeting people" as a fine art, never allowed her small self to be overawed by famed authors. It was her sales of stories to College Humor that led to her being hired there.

An outgrowth of the defunct Collegiate World, College Humor began in 1921 as a quarterly, the staff & equipment consisting chiefly of Publisher Lansinger, shears and pastepot. It was merely a scrapbook of cartoons and jokes from U. S. under graduate funny-books. In 1923 long, lean, curly-headed "Swanie" Swanson, fresh out of Grinnell College where he edited the Malteaser, got a job as Mr. Lansinger's secretary. He worked up to the editorship, was largely responsible for the editorial polish which College Humor later acquired as a monthly magazine of original fiction, articles, drawings, interspersed with clippings from the campus comics.

Energetic Editor Swanson went after big-name contributors. Many of them appeared only once; sometimes their contributions would be brief or palpably second-rate. Occasionally -- as in the case of Donald Ogden Stewart's Rebound and Noel Coward's Private Lives which had already been produced on the stage -- they were comparatively stale. But the names on the cover, names like Alec Waugh. George Jean Nathan, Stephen Vincent Benet, Wallace Irwin, were impressive.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.