Rose-Colored Geography

The National Geographic Society, which finances scientific discovery, prints maps, and publishes the National Geographic Magazine, is the least exclusive, farthest flung and most improbable nonprofit publishing corporation in the world. Last year it sponsored an expedition to South America in search of the world's largest ant (longer than 1 in.), underwrote a dozen other scientific projects around the globe, printed 17.5 million maps, and gained 125,000 members, to bring total circulation to 2,440,000. The Magazine (a word customarily capitalized by the society) sends 849 copies to Uganda and Kenya, 57 to Broken Bow, Neb., 73 to North Borneo, and one to Hunza, a Central Asian state so remote that the Magazine each month must be carried 12,000 miles by boat, train, plane, Jeep and native runner to accommodate its lone subscriber, His Highness the Mir. With remarkable loyalty, 87% of National Geographic subscribers voluntarily renew.

Behind the National Geographic's familiar, fussy, yellow-bordered cover--essentially unchanged since 1910--lies a publishing success formula as improbable as the society that conceived it. The charter members met in Washington one January night in 1888 determined to promote "the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge." At first their magazine was filled with minutes of meetings and obscure scientific tracts. But when an inventor named Alexander Graham Bell took over as the society's president in 1898, he decided that it needed a full-time editor and a broader appeal. A year later he found the right man: Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, a 23-year-old, ninth-generation New Englander. Gilbert Grosvenor married Bell's daughter, ran and built the Magazine for the next 55 years, and left his son to take over after he retired.

Bare-Breasted Boldness. With Bell's approval, Editor Grosvenor drew a bead on the world's armchair explorers. In the name of geography he exposed the female breast, printed a 1903 study of two tawny Tagbanua belles eclipsed only to the waist by a stand of Philippine rice. Such displays became Geographic fixtures. He expanded geographical boundaries to embrace first-person travelogues from Tahiti, Siberia and the Yukon, kite construction (they were Bell's kites), the sex life of the aborigines, and skin tattoos. In 1905 he came up to a deadline with an eleven-page hole, filled all eleven pages with pictures of Tibet--the first extensive use of photographs by any magazine. The reader response to this desperation measure was so enthusiastic that from then on, pictures became as important as words.

Over the years, the Geographic has compiled a roll call of contributors, lecturers and explorers that scans like a picket fence of U.S. history: Robert E. Peary (to whose 1906 assault on the North Pole the society contributed $1,000), Colonel George W. Goethals (who built the Panama Canal and told Geographic members all about it), Wilbur Wright, Teddy Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, Richard Byrd, Billy Mitchell (who propounded his theory of airpower in the March 1921 issue), "Hap" Arnold, Chester Nimitz, Arthur Radford. Equally impressive is the Magazine's current board of trustees, e.g., U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Curtis E. LeMay, Pan American Airways' President Juan Trippe.

Nothing to Say. To stay abreast of the missile era, the Magazine has added to its list of contributors many a starlit name from the ranks of space engineers, e.g., Hugh Dryden and Heinz Haber, remapped the firmament in its monumental Sky Atlas (price: about $1,200), even peddled (for $2) a Sputnik-tracing kit for the edification of backyard satellite hunters. But it remains solidly indentured to the principles laid down by Gilbert Grosvenor years ago, still segregates advertising and editorial copy, runs no liquor, tobacco or real-estate ads, hustles no lagging subscriber, still refuses to say anything controversial or unkind of any individual, race, country or hemisphere. "I was always taught not to criticize other people," said Gilbert Grosvenor.

This rule gives an unrealistic hue to the Geographic's rose-colored world; the Geographic has not carried an article on Soviet Russia for 15 years. "How can we do it," said Editor Melville Bell Grosvenor, "without making it sound friendly?" The Geographic is trying, now has a Russian article in the works.

Editor Grosvenor, 57, happily follows the principles set by his father, believes that "controversy" should be left to other publications. Last week Geographic staffers, their faces solemn and awestruck as any tourist's, legged it eagerly through Jamaica, Yucatan, Cambodia, Hawaii, Chile, Australia, Italy, India and the South Seas. What they sensed and saw would be pleasantly and blandly recorded, at the Magazine's leisure, in some future issue. No rush about it: a magazine whose color inks are mixed to stay brilliant 2 1/2 centuries cannot be expected to hurry.

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