Spectators

Four men sat around a long conference table in a Manhattan publisher's office one day last week, registering varying degrees of pleasure. Large, dapper Publisher Richard Roy Smith beamed. Wide-eyed Critic George Jean Nathan puffed contentedly on a cigar. Ernest Boyd lolled crosslegged, grinning through his messianic beard. Hulking Theodore Dreiser looked less glum than usual. All had just learned that the first monthly issue of The American Spectator ("A Literary Newspaper") published by Mr. Smith and edited by the three writers (plus James Branch Cabell and Eugene O'Neill) had sold out its entire edition of 12,000 copies in a day, that newsdealers were shouting for 10,000 more. Within a few days still another 10,000 had to be printed.

The Spectator is a four-page sheet of heavy, uncoated stock the size of a newspaper, printed in 5 wide columns. It carries no illustrations, thus far no advertising, sells for 10-c-. Its purpose: "... to offer a medium for the truly valuable and adventurous in thought." Its criteria: ''clarity, vigor, humor . . . real knowledge and a decided point of view." The idea was George Jean Nathan's. From his long experience with monthly magazines, notably Smart Set and American Mercury, he had found "that it is impossible to get enough good copy each month to fill. . . . [The editor] is only too happy, indeed, if he can get even so many as two things that really please him." The Spectator limited itself to four pages until pressure of irresistible copy should force expansion. The editors pledged themselves to "call it a day and retire in a body to their estates" the moment they feel the paper become a dull matter of habit.

Editor Nathan first took his plan to O'Neill, for the first time in his life saw O'Neill get excited. Then he lined up the others. The editors are unsalaried, hold conferences in two uptown speakeasies, hope to have profits to share. Contributors are paid 1-c- a word.

Features of the first issue: a lament by Havelock Ellis over the neglect of the psychophysical processes of sex in medical education; an article by Ernest Boyd deriding the pseudo-erudition of the U. S. aesthete, the New Humanists, and what he called The New Republic of Letters; a humorous comparison of U. S. and English publishers by Frank Swinnerton; an insane courtroom scene by Ring Lardner parodying the incoherent meanderings of James John Walker's defense counsel in the ex-mayor's trial before Governor Roosevelt (TIME, Aug. 22 et seq.); a vitriolic attack on the Church and censorship in Ireland by Liam O'Flaherty; an objection to the prevalence of sexless leading women on the stage by Critic Nathan; an argument by Dreiser for control of adult population; articles by Eugene O'Neill, Clarence Darrow, James Branch Cabell, Louis Untermeyer, Joseph Wood Krutch, etc. etc.

The Spectator nominates a Worst Book of the Month: Chaucer, by G. K. Chesterton; inaugurates an English Men of Letters Series by reprinting from the London Daily Mail an advertisement written by D. B. Wyndham Lewis. Excerpt: ''Every time a fairy sneezes, a new Lyons' Swiss Roll is born, and every time a fairy trips over a bluebell, his remark breaks into a million pieces. Some of them turn into Nippys. . . . The jam is very whimsy and is made of fruit which has been peeped at by rabbits very early in the morning. ..."

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