Strictly Personal

YOUNG COLLEGE MAN, travelled, slightly peeved and irked, not disenchanted, would relish hearing from bright young things with gay outlook, brilliant notions. Box 151-J.

Young College Men, Venturesome Lasses and Literate Gentlemen have long packed the Saturday Review of Literature's Personals with lonely heartthrobs and V-necked prose that made lively reading. But last week S.R.L., with the air of a matron swearing off sweets, announced that it would print no more "advertisements inviting correspondence." Said the weekly: its circulation had grown too fat for it "to monitor [the ads] properly." In his Manhattan office, Publisher Jack Cominsky was more blunt. "These people," said he, "should be going to psychiatrists. Their ads represent an aspect of the magazine which it has outgrown."

The Personals were started in 1932 by Poet Louis Untermeyer, who wanted to sell a pet donkey. He sold the beast so quickly through an S.R.L. ad that other readers began inserting bright ads for old books, jobs and pen pals. Palship sometimes ripened into marriage. Lecturing in Tulsa once, Editor Norman Cousins was joyfully kissed by a young woman who gurgled that she had met her husband through a Saturday Review Personal; he had lived only four blocks away all the time. One woman who asked for male mail and signed herself "Oil Widow," was deluged with 800-odd letters.

Pen-palship was not the only thing S.R.L. had outgrown. By adding reviews of phonograph records, art, theater, radio and movies and articles on travel and international affairs, S.R.L. had become more than a bookish magazine. Its circulation had risen from 32,000 to 110,000 in a decade and it was solidly in the black. With last week's issue, S.R.L. officially noted its broader outlook; it clipped the of Literature off its cover title. S.R.L.'s editors wanted to call the magazine the Saturday Review when it was founded in 1924, but the title was then used by a British magazine which has since folded.

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