A Cultured Voice Falls Silent

Saturday Review, after 58 noteworthy years, ceases publication

For many years the logo of the Saturday Review was a mythical bird: the phoenix, rising reborn from its own ashes. The symbolism remained apt even after the logo was dropped in 1977. During much of its 58-year life span, the "magazine of ideas," as it called itself, has lost money; since 1971 it has been sold or refinanced five times. SR has been by turns a weekly, a biweekly, a monthly; at one point it was split into four separate magazines. Over the years it shifted focus from books to popular culture to politics and science and then, in its last incarnation, back to culture again. It built circulation from a few thousand shortly after its birth to a height of 660,000 in 1971; but since then it has repeatedly tried to shake off a doggedly loyal readership that an owner once dismissively described as "somebody's aunts," in order to improve its demographics and attract new advertising. Through all the changes of editorial focus, Saturday Review, as if emulating the mythology of its old emblem, refused to die.

Last week, however, the phoenix returned to ash, probably not to rise again. Owner Robert Weingarten, a former stockbroker and publisher of the investment journal Financial World, who had lost $3 million on SR since taking over in 1980, ordered a halt on the issues at the printers and dismissed the remaining two dozen members of an already reduced staff. His sad conclusion: SR was doomed without an unaffordable injection of at least $5 million for circulation and promotion. For months he had tried to merge with another magazine, to sell SR, or even to give it away. Potential buyers were at first intrigued about acquiring a magazine that had published T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passes, James Thurber and G.K. Chesterton, and that had been credited with helping secure passage in Congress of the 1963 nuclear-test-ban treaty. But upon analysis, would-be bidders deemed SR too risky. Admitted Weingarten: "Saturday Review has had a long and distinguished tradition. But we have invested all that we felt prudent to invest."

What finally brought Saturday Review down, despite its circulation, right up to the end, of nearly 500,000? One former SR editor argued that the magazine had failed to assimilate the social changes in America that began in the late 1960s, and had become outmoded. Another suggested that it had become so inextricably linked over the years with longtime Editor Norman Cousins that when he stepped down in 1978, SR lost much of its essential identity. But perhaps the fatal factor was, in Weingarten's phrase, "the cost of getting and maintaining a subscriber."

Most magazines today are sold in three ways: on newsstands, by subscriptions ordered directly from the publications, and by subscriptions brokered tions, and by subscriptions brokered through agencies. Direct subscriptions provide enough income per buyer to help offset printing and distribution costs. By comparison, agencies siphon off so much of the subscriber's payment that the magazine loses money on each copy. But the increase in readership is supposed to enable publishers to recoup through higher advertising rates. Saturday Review got the bulk of its readers through agencies, said a former editor, "because we wanted to K8 get consumer advertising, liquor, tobacco, automobiles, and the minimum circulation I for that seems to be about 450,000." Despite exceeding that goal, SR still failed to at tract sufficient advertising.

The Saturday Review of Literature, as it was called until 1952, began in 1924 as a spin-off of the weekly books supplement to the New York Post. The founding editor, Henry Seidel Canby, was a Yale lecturer in literature and chief judge for 32 years of the Book-of-the-Month Club. A key associate was William Rose Benet, a Pulitzer-prize-winning poet. In 1940, control passed to Norman Cousins, then 25, whose editorial interests took in the sciences, travel, the music-recording business and, above all, politics. A dedicated liberal activist, he used SR's once staid pages to crusade for U.S. medical treatment for the "Hiroshima maidens" in the 1940s, for disarmament in the 1950s, for aid to rebuild a Vietnamese village ravaged by U.S. Marines in the 1960s. But he always proved a shrewd salesman; his special sections on topics such as education and stereo electronics often attracted foundation support or extra advertising. Cousins made SR solvent enough that McCall Corp., publisher of McCall's and other magazines, acquired it for $3 million in 1961.

A decade later the magazine, still under Cousins' editorship, was sold to the founders of Psychology Today, who split it into four monthlies dealing with education, science, the arts and "the society." Cousins disagreed with that strategy and walked out. By 1973 the fragmented SR was in bankruptcy and Cousins strode back in. He restored the old formula but not the old form. In 1977 a new investor group took over, and in 1978 Cousins reduced his role to that of columnist.

When word spread of SR's potential demise, its loyalists wondered whether Cousins might leave his professorship at the University of California at Los Angeles to try once again. Said he with a tinge of the old SR editorial bravado: "I like to think of Saturday Review as an antidote to the sleaziness that is invading our national culture, the cult of incoherence, the competition to pulverize language and glamorize brutality." He paused. "You bet I am tempted to return. But if I am wise, I will suppress the temptation." -

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