The Price of Liberty

When the Nov. 23 issue of Atlas Corp.'s Liberty appeared on U.S. newsstands last week, its chief feature was not editorial but a whopping 16-page ad, largest ever run in a national weekly. The ad: Lionel Corp.'s entire Christmas catalogue of toy electric trains.

Lionel, back at its old stand as the world's No. 1 toy trainmaker after four wartime years spent turning out $19 million worth of navigational instruments, hoped to do a $10,000,000 business this year. To do it, Lionel wanted a million catalogues to tell U.S. small fry about its wondrous new models that smoke and whistle while they work by electronics. But no job printer was able to handle the order.

So Lionel advertising manager Joseph E. Hanson made a shrewd deal with Liberty. With the fewest ads of any magazine in its class, Liberty had plenty of paper and its rates were low enough to fit Lionel's budget.

Anemic Liberty was so flushed with joy that it added a front cover on trains, considered the first-rate catalogue a better draw than its fiction. Cried a Liberty executive: "With kids and their dads crying their eyes out for trains, that catalogue made a real come-on proposition."

For Lionel, which had figured on paying about $125,000 to have catalogues printed by a job printer, the deal was a money-saver. Its ad cost only $76,240, gave the catalogue a guaranteed circulation of 1,360,000. For another $22,000, Lionel got 600,000 additional catalogues to distribute on its own. Clucked advertising manager Hanson: "An arrangement like this should solve our problem for a year anyway." Liberty wished it could say the same.

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