For Gentle Book-Buyers

Persons who are literary-minded read magazines like The Bookman, The Saturday Review of Literature, The Colophon, But the booklover and the average reader may be completely different persons. To serve the varied interests of those who patronize bookstores a new monthly magazine appeared last week called Gentle Reader, "a single periodical that would keep [the average reader] completely in touch with the world of books and also present to him within the same covers all the reasonable diversions of modern life."

Actually Gentle Reader is published as much for the bookseller as for the purchaser. It will be distributed solely at bookstores, the bookseller buying copies of the magazine and giving them away to his steady customers or mailing them for $1 a year. Of the first issue 50,000 copies went to 150 stores. Book publishers are represented in the magazine only as paying advertisers.

Publishers of Gentle Reader are Music Critic Samuel Chotzinoff, editor of the magazine, and Managing Editor Richard Manson. Literary editor is Author John Erskine, with whom are associated Lloyd Morris as reviewer of fiction, Byron Steel of biography. Staff writers advertised: Herbert Bayard Swope, politics; Percy Hammond, theatre; Richard Watts Jr., cinema; William Cotton, art; Mary Watkins, dancing.

First issue of Gentle Reader substantiated the publishers' claims of catholicity. Besides regular departments there were a piece of nonsense by Frank Sullivan, a discussion by M. R. Werner of Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, an article on bridge by Sidney S. Lenz, a review of fashions.

Suspicion that Gentle Reader may be just another blurb sheet is allayed by the discovery in its pages of definitely condemnatory book reviews.

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