Good Bet for a Baltic Baron

The enthusiastic reception that greeted the New York Review of Books on its debut last February in the midst of the newspaper strike raised an inevitable question: Would it ever appear again? Last week 100,000 copies of issue No. 2, crammed with critiques from the likes of Stephen Spender, Robert Heilbroner and Truman Capote, and carrying 18 pages of ads in its 48 tabloid-sized pages, were on sale at newsstands and bookstores across Manhattan. This time the Review made no secret of when it would turn up next. Emboldened by a near sellout of their first, 100,000-copy issue, Editors Barbara Epstein and Bob Silvers declared that "there may be sufficient demand in America to support a literary review of this sort." They announced that come September, they will begin publishing twice a month. They may even start paying their writers 5-c- a word--which is a nickel a word more than they have been paying up to now.

Where will the money come from? The editors are not saying--possibly because they don't yet know. Critic Edmund Wilson, who contributed a sprightly three-page interview with himself in issue No. 2, speculated that the angel might be "one of those Baltic barons" who married a rich American and, now that she has died and left him all her money, "doesn't know what to do with it." Wilson obviously thinks his bogus baron could do worse than to spend it supporting the Review. "God knows that some such thing is needed," said he. "The disappearance of the Times Sunday book section at the time of the printers' strike only made us realize it had never existed."

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