Too Many Magazines?

In the cavernous big-city terminals and at dinky way stations the story had been the same: bored G.I.s and other wartime travelers swarmed over the newsstands like locusts. The magazines did not have to be too good; they sold anyway. They also sold like hot cakes to the forces overseas, and in camps at home. But by last week things were getting back to normal, and many a publisher's wartime boom was going bust.

The comics were hit first. Outgrowing the moppet market, they had tapped a ready-made public: the soldiers loved them. At the peak, when anything from Supersnipe to Super Duck would move, sales had hit 40 million a month. Now they were down to 27 million, and still skidding. War-born pulps were going begging, too. One firm, whose stable of magazines goes up & down at the drop of a dime, had dumped 64 titles (Green Mask Comics, Sleepy Time Stories, etc.). But buyers still had some 1,200 titles to choose from.

The pocket-sized field was more crowded than ever, with digests and pocket books fighting for space on the stands. DeWitt Wallace's money-minting Reader's Digest, which climbed to a guesstimated 8,000,000 U.S. circulation, came out of the war in the pink of health. It could easily afford a drop in the G.I. trade. But many an imitator could not; they worried over heavy returns.

Wallace's boldest competitor is David (Esquire) Smart's smart and colorful Coronet. By dropping its cuts of Etruscan vases in favor of homey pictures of kids & pets, it had shot up (said Smart) to 4,000,000 from a puny prewar 120,000. Recently Coronet got into a "saturation race" with the Digest. Both had been selling out regularly. Now armed with more paper, they dumped thousands of extra copies on the market to see what it could stand. Returns jumped heavily, but both hit their biggest circulations in history for that time of year.

Up Costs, Up Prices. For the first time since the war began, top-drawer mass magazines were feeling the old summer newsstand slump. But giants like LIFE, Satevepost and McCall's were not. Neither were the glamor mags. Street & Smith's Mademoiselle and Charm, Walter Annenberg's Seventeen and Hearst's new Junior Bazaar were selling pellmell. Women's magazines have made spectacular advertising gains this year. So has the Post which picked up 29% while Atlas Corp.'s limping Liberty lost 30%.

In pursuit of costs, magazine prices were going up. First Curtis hiked Ladies' Home Journal, once a dime, from 15-c- to a quarter. LIFE this week went up a nickel to 15-c-. Nation and New Republic whispered to each other, decided they could get $6 a year instead of $5.

Ebbing sales gave circulation veterans no alarm. The country's 105,000 newsstands were crowded beyond reason anyway, and survival of the fittest might straighten things out by fall. That would clear the decks for a more exciting war: the coming fight for public favor between the fittest.

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