Extra! Extra!

A practically irresistible new U.S. history was published this week. It was in tabloid newspaper style and format -- as if the history were happening while it was read (see cut).

News of the Nation by Sylvan Hoffman and C. Hartley Grattan (Garden City; $3.49) might turn out to be a revolution in text-teaching. It is almost certain to be a huge favorite of parlor readers and guessing-gamesters. It consists of 41 four-page tabloid editions which bring vivid immediacy to events from Columbus' discovery through Pearl Harbor.

Thus, the hanging of Captain Kidd is a page one crime story. There are fashion jottings on the grey topper and bustle. Significant sports items such as the Sullivan v. Kilrain championship fight bob up. "Gracious Living Today" depicts authentic colonial home furnishings. The books and plays of the times are reviewed, including the London opening of William Shakespeare's The Tempest.

The big history-shaping event of each period takes the main headline, the story being told in 1944 idiom. Other stories reflect the background. For example, in the four editions covering the Civil War period -- from the headlined "Sumter Surrenders, War Begins" to "Lincoln Assassinated" -- there are stories on the European reaction, the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania, the first transatlantic cable, Queen Victoria's troubles with India, and Blondin's crossing of Niagara on a cable.

Aims and the Men. News of the Nation is an exciting reversal of the usual heavily documented, battles-to-treaties historical form. It manages to avoid the merely flip and irrelevant and as neatly sidesteps the ponderously global. Its aims: 1) information for the adult, now more than ever history-minded ; 2) supplementary reading for the history student (teachers can get it in sections, for era-to-era instruction).

Columbia's Allan Nevins thinks that News of the Nation ". . . promises to bring a fresh breath into the schoolroom." Charles A. Beard finds it "hard to imagine a more effective way of attracting general readers to American history." Newsmen could applaud a professional job of writing, editing, presentation.

The idea of the history came to husky-voiced, 52-year-old Sylvan Hoffman, Manhattan business magazines publisher (Shipping Management, American Roofer, Beach and Pool, Black Fox Magazine}, when he saw a parade of historic headlines in the New York Times 's 90th anniversary edition in 1941. Onetime Texas reporter, not a college graduate, Hoffman tried his idea on some 20 educators and historians, found them sympathetic, then found in C. (for Clinton) Hartley Grattan an enthusiastic collaborator. Author Grattan (The Deadly Parallel, Australia's Foreign Policy, etc.) once called the usual written history "academic mythology . . . because it fails to reckon with the buzzing, multifarious reality in which men acted the events."

Hoffman and Grattan worked more than two years, Grattan writing the editorial interpretations, assigning stories to Hoffman and a small staff of full-time and part-time writers (largely Manhattan newspaper and magazine men). Hoffman wrote most of the stories, inspired the cartoons, wrote the headlines and did all the makeup (using as his model Manhattan's tabloid Daily News). Some of the 600-plus illustrations came from his grandfather's old books and magazines, which Hoffman dug out of his attic.

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