Beauty Contest

On the floor of an empty floor of the Ayer Building in Philadelphia last week was a checkerboard of 1,485 white patches. Each patch was a newspaper. Up and down the rows, from morning until midnight, walked three men, stopping, stooping, looking, rising, walking wearily on again until their joints ached. Sometimes they turned a page upside down to scan its pattern better, look for white "rivers"' of loose-set type or ill-spaced headlines. The three were Dr. Ralph Droz Casey, chairman of journalism at University of Minnesota, Editor Laurence B. Siegfried of American Printer and Editor Henry R. Luce of TIME and FORTUNE. They were jurors in the fourth annual newspaper typography competition sponsored by N. W. Ayer & Son advertising agency. All the papers were issues of March 5, a date preannounced for the contest and pointed for carefully by makeup men.

As "sweepstakes" winner the jurors chose the New York Herald Tribune, giving it its second leg on the silver Ayer cup. (It won the first contest in 1931.) Among newspapers of 10,000 to 50,000 circulation the Sheboygan (Wis.) Press won honors; among papers under 10,000 circulation, the Hornell (N. Y.) Evening Tribune-Times.

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