Hemispheric Editions

Four months ago Reader's Digest left its calling card in Latin America--a Spanish-language edition of 117,000 copies. To newsstands went 80,000 copies (10-c- a copy); to subscribers went 37,000 annual subscriptions ($1 a year), about half of them donated by good-neighborly U.S. readers. Included were 32 pages of ads--first in Reader's Digest--by such firms as Gillette Razor, General Motors, Parker Pen, Kellogg's Corn Flakes, big oil companies.

Last week Reader's Digest reported a thriving Latin-American friendship: Current print order of Selecciones del Reader's Digest is 350,000, biggest of Spanish-language magazines. Of these, about 255,-ooo will go to South American newsstands, 75,000 to subscribers, about 20,000 to Spanish classes in U.S. high schools and colleges.

Now well in the red, Selecciones helps to reduce the unwieldy large profits of its parent magazine. But in March 1942, Selecciones' ad rates, now based on a circulation of 100,000, will be boosted from $360 to $630 a page, and Publisher DeWitt Wallace thinks he may break even on his contribution to Pan-American cultural relations.

To Latin-American subscribers and newsstands this week, by Pan American Clippers, go 20,000 copies of this issue of TIME, printed on lightweight paper--in English--the new Air Express Edition of TIME.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.