The Minnow & the Whale

After 1942, when voluble Author-Journalist Norman Cousins became its editor, the Saturday Review of Literature began trying by one device after another to escape its original charter as a magazine of literary criticism. But for all its experimentation, the Saturday Review (circ. 248,179) has remained a magazine of comparatively limited audience. Last week it accepted a boost from a giant.

The giant was McCall Corp., publisher of McCall's (circ. 6,275,280), Redbook (circ. 3,074,710), and the world's largest magazine job printers (one billion copies of 56 magazines last year). In a deal soon to be signed and sealed, McCall Corp. will acquire the Saturday Review as a wholly owned subsidiary. In exchange, the Saturday Review's twelve stockholders--by far the biggest of whom are Editor Cousins and Publisher Jacob R. Cominsky--will get about $3,000,000 in McCall Corp. stock. But the chief attraction of the deal for Cousins and Cominsky is that under the new setup the Saturday Review will be able to use McCall's distribution and promotion facilities to grow with--as well as its capital to grow on.

The Unbounded. When Editor Cousins, now a youthful-looking 48, joined the Saturday Review 20 years ago, it was in debt up to its ears and struggling along on a cadre of 28,000 bibliophiles devoted to its book reviews and criticism. Cousins set in motion, but without blueprint, an editorial expansion program that carried the magazine so far beyond its original character as the Saturday Review of Literature that the last two words of its name were jettisoned in 1952.

As the Saturday Review, the magazine has ventured into almost any area that has stirred Cousins' rather grab-bag curiosity: music, travel, science, education, business and communications. Sometimes these trails lead to pay dirt: Science Editor John Lear's 1959 expose of the antibiotic drug industry ultimately forced the resignation of a divisional director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Sometimes they lead only into murky corners, such as last month's warning to U.S. space-program planners of the dangers of pushing into the unknown. Spain and Portugal tried exploring the unknown five and a half centuries ago, recalled the Saturday Review direly, and look where they've ended up.

Testing. Circulation of the Saturday Review has more than doubled in the last decade, and 1960 advertising revenue was $1,867,000, up $300,000 over 1959. But Cousins is anxious to accelerate the pace. With an editorial staff of only two dozen, the magazine has outgrown its quarters in midtown Manhattan, farms out its printing, and has almost no field sales organization (two representatives on the West Coast, one in the South).

The union with McCall Corp. will give the 37-year-old Saturday Review a hard-driving new proprietor: West Coast Industrialist (wood, matches, processed food) Norton Simon, 53, who began acquiring control of McCall Corp. in 1954. Simon has promised his new possession editorial independence--a promise that presumably extends to Editor Cousins' numerous extracurricular crusades, most notable of which is his co-chairmanship of SANE, a citizens' group dedicated to the final abolition of nuclear tests. But independence can be a relative thing. Only after Cousins & Co. have finally moved into McCall's spacious quarters at 230 Park Avenue and their little magazine has joined the other 56 magazines printed on the McCall presses in Dayton will the readiness of a whale to respect the independence of a minnow get its real test.

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