Chainstore Reading

Best test of a good idea is performance; strongest acknowledgment, imitation. Next month will end a year's performance by Tower Magazines (Illustrated Love, Illustrated Detective, Home, New Movie), published solely for sale in the F. W. Woolworth Co. chain stores--a strategic play for the concentrated women-shopper circulation (TIME. Aug. 19, 1929). Last fortnight saw the appearance of two similar magazines on the counters of S. S. Kresge and S. H. Kress chain stores--testimonials to the idea that a million women who never patronize a newsstand will buy 10-c- love-fiction, mystery, Hollywood chatter every month in a department store.

The so-called "Kresge Books"--Modern Screen Magazine, Modern Love Magazine--are published by a subsidiary of Dell Publishing Co. The first issues, totaling 525,000 copies, were sold out within five days. Next issues, totaling 675,000, will go on sale Dec. 15; thereafter, monthly.

Like Tower Magazines Inc., the Dell Company is emphatic that its magazines "stand on their own feet," that they are offered just like any other merchandise in Kress and Kresge stores, which do not guarantee their sale. Also like the Woolworth group, the Dell magazines already give promise of gathering bountiful advertising from makers of goods retailed by Kress and Kresge. E. g.: An inside cover advertisement for hair nets with the legend, "Sold exclusively at S. S. Kresge Co."

Under the guidance of able, bobbed-haired Publisher Catherine MacNelis, sale of the four Tower magazines climbed from 1,205,052 copies in January to more than 1,432,000 for the November issue. Of the four, New Movie has a circulation of more than 800,000, claimed to be the largest of any screen magazine in the world. Advertisers take space in all four magazines of a given issue. This practice holds for the Dell magazines also.

Giving a reverse twist to the same basic idea, Kroger Grocery & Baking Co. (5,200 stores in the midwest) approached publishers last year with the proposal: "The average chain grocery is handier to the home than the average drug store. Why not sell through us?" Alert Editor George Horace Lorimer promptly seized upon the plan for Curtis Publishing Co. Last February, Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal were on sale in a few Kroger stores; last week in 1,459; next month in 350 more. Each magazine is rolled inside a wrapper bearing the Kroger name, and a legend suggesting that most of the advertised food and grocery products are available where the magazine was bought.

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