Geography for Everyman

When Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor took over the National Geographic in 1899, he likes to recall, the circulation was so small (900) that "I could carry the entire issue on my back." Today, says Grosvenor, who shares his magazine's passionate addiction to detail, "A single issue would form a pile more than eight miles high, or 79 piles each as tall as the Washington Monument." In its familiar yellow-bordered, acorn-decorated wrapper, this month's issue reached 2,150,000 living rooms, libraries, throne rooms and dentists' offices from Maine to Monaco.

This week, in recognition of his responsibility for this fine growth, and in tribute to his 50 years of service, the National Geographic Society will present President and Editor Gilbert Grosvenor with a special medal at a jubilee celebration in Washington's Constitution Hall.

What Bell Wrought. At 73, Editor Grosvenor is a frail-looking, energetic man with a neat white mustache, a Phi Beta Kappa key and the manner of a Boston Brahmin. Grosvenor was born (with a twin brother now dead) in Constantinople, where his father was a professor at Robert College. Fittingly enough, from his nursery window the future geographer could see two continents.

Soon after graduating from Amherst College, Gilbert fell in love with Elsie May Bell, daughter of Telephone Inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who was president of the National Geographic Society. When Bell offered Grosvenor a job on the Geographic, he took it (just to be near

"Ellie," whom he soon married) and has been there ever since.

The turn-of-the-century Geographic was a stodgy scientific journal, written with old-fashioned portentousness, and floundering in debt. Grosvenor stuck to the pattern for six years. One day in 1905, a packet of photographs from Tibet landed on his desk. Grosvenor was fascinated by the rugged Tibetan scenery and the Dalai Lama's palace. On an impulse, he spread the pictures across eleven pages. The issue created a sensation: almost by accident, Grosvenor had discovered how to make geography popular.

What the Lama Brought. Insubsequent issues, Editor Grosvenor has stretched his romantic, unscientific definition of geography to cover everything under (and above) the sun. To the Geographic, geography means kites and cats, ostriches and insanity, the Bagdad market and the Berlin airlift, eruptions of volcanoes, bathyspheres and the stratosphere, fishing, fine arts and the sex life of savages. Peripatetic, insatiably curious Gilbert Grosvenor has written 300 articles and taken 200 of the photographs. He was the first U.S. editor to use natural color photographs (a 24-page spread on China and Korea in 1910).

He has built the National Geographic Society to a reserve fund of $10 million, mostly from the Geographic's tax-free earnings (it is classed as an educational institution). Besides the magazine, the society also publishes books, bulletins and maps, maintains a 20,000-volume library, sponsors geographic lectures and underwrites scientific expeditions. Grateful explorers have named after Grosvenor a Greenland sea shell, an Antarctic mountain range, an Alaskan lake, a Chinese plant and a Peruvian fish.

Editor Grosvenor wields an autocratic blue pencil, even on articles written for the Geographic by U.S. Presidents, e.g., Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, Coolidge and Hoover. Most articles and "legends" (captions) are written by the studious, well-paid editorial staff of 149. Grosvenor sets the tone, which is frequently florid, sometimes quaint, always polite. Says Grosvenor: "We prefer to print only what is of a kindly nature." He has even found a friendly word to say for wasps.

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