Four Score & Ten

With un-Bostonian enthusiasm, the Atlantic Monthly had beaten the drum for its 90th anniversary number: "No night fireworks over the lagoon, no drum majorettes, trotting races or paper hats. Nary a clam will be baked. Just a slightly fatter than usual issue filled . . . with a rich assortment of good reading. . . . Otherwise, it will be the same kind of supernormal, extraordinary, quite-without-precedent, all-time-high collection that the subscribers get in the mail every month."

The flamadiddles were justified. In the November anniversary number, Editor Edward A. ("Ted") Weeks had rounded up: Albert Einstein on atomic-energy control (as told to Raymond Swing); war letters of General George S. Patton Jr.; unpublished love letters of Mark Twain; excerpts from the notebooks of Henry James; part of a new novel by John P. Marquand; articles by George Bernard Shaw, Budd Schulberg, Sumner Welles, Sir Richard Livingstone.* To show off these prizes to better advantage, the Atlantic had freshened up its format, run its first four-color cover and had its type face lifted by topnotch Typographer W. A. Dwiggins.

New Flavor. In Weeks's nine years as editor, the Atlantic's circulation had climbed to a record 160,956. After years of losing money or just breaking even, it had made money from 1943 through 1946. But it had slipped into the red in its last fiscal year, chiefly because of heavy spending for promotion. It is continuing the spending, and "does not expect to turn the profit corner this year." Weeks knew that soaring paper and production costs might mean hard times ahead. But he hopes that the promotion splurge and the Atlantic's color (and photographs he plans to put on covers) will help it to hit 200,000 and bring in more advertising.

Like the eight distinguished editors before him, New Jersey-born, Harvard-educated Ted Weeks is careful to nurture the Atlantic's New England roots, but just as careful not to trip on them. He does not forget that the Atlantic has a bigger circulation in California than in Massachusetts. In the Atlantic's ivy-covered Back Bay brownstone home on Arlington Street, opposite the Public Garden, Weeks labors at a furious pace. He does much of his work in a Windsor chair with his lap full of manuscripts, shortens interviews by seating visitors in an uncomfortable straight-backed Italian chair.

Old Trees. The Atlantic gets 40,000 manuscripts a year and the nine-man staff reads them all. (The G.B.S. piece came in "over the transom"--unsolicited.) Associate Editor Charles W. Morton helps Weeks develop new article ideas. They understand each other so well that conferences are as elliptical as shorthand. (Morton to Weeks: "Atomic bomb--Einstein." Weeks to Morton: "I'll call Swing.")

Weeks pays $100 to $350 for stories and articles, three times as much as his predecessors did. Editor Weeks gets bargains because of the Atlantic's prestige. And by encouraging new writers, he has often been able to use their later fame--and articles --to add to this prestige. The only remaining competitor in the Atlantic's field is 97-year-old Harper's, and the Atlantic is now ahead of it in circulation. Weeks wishes there were more competitors. Old trees, he likes to say, are always healthier when they stand together,

* The first number, published in 1857, had offered its handful of readers Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Greenleaf Whittier.

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