College Life

The university undergraduate population of the U. S. is about 750,000. Add hundreds of thousands of high school youngsters and "townies" who want to talk and act like collegians, and you have a fertile circulation field for a collegiate magazine. The field was well tilled by College Humor which several years ago hit a circulation peak of 350,000. But circulation at 35-c- a copy could not survive hard times. It dwindled to 140,000 last year when College Humor, heavily burdened by overhead, fell into the hands of creditors who turned it over to a new publisher. Since then it has been published as College Humor and Sense, smaller than before, less collegiate, price 15-c-.

The metamorphosis was watched with interest by a onetime assistant editor of College Humor, George Teeple Eggleston, now editor of Life. To him it seemed a strategic moment. He went to his boss, Publisher Clair Maxwell, persuaded him that Life ought, for the first time in 50 years, to publish something besides Life. The result appeared this week--the first issue of University. Like College Humor twelve years ago, University was tentatively begun as a quarterly. Price: 25-c-.

Fat (96 pages), typographically neat, University resembles the old College Humor, even to the conventional Rolf Armstrong cover. It includes a dozen pages of campus humor bought from undergraduate funnybooks; a novelette and a short story; a profusion of cartoons; sports by famed Grantland Rice; humorous sketches by such surefire Life contributors as Robert Benchley, Margaret Fishback, Gurney Williams, Montague Glass, Sam Hellman. Good feature : a portfolio of informal pictures of campus celebrities.

University boasts of its collegian editorial board. Assisting Editor Eggleston (who edited the California Pelican, 1928) are Gurney Williams (Michigan Gargoyle, 1931) and Joseph A. Thompson (Stanford Chaparral, 1931).

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