New Life for Liberty

Nostalgia, that longing for the no-longer, has proved profitable in fashion, films and the Broadway stage, where the revival of 1925's No, No Nanette is one of the tightest tickets in town. Now it is moving into publishing. The venerable Saturday Evening Post will rise again as a quarterly in June, and April will bring forth the rebirth of Liberty. The self-styled "weekly for everybody" folded in 1950 after a quarter-century of high circulation but low profits. Peddled door-to-door by a small army of kids coveting catchers' mitts, Liberty leaned hard on such come-ons as Mahatma Gandhi's "My Sex Life," Greta Garbo's "Why I Will Not Marry," Al Capone's "How I Would Run This Country" and Shirley Temple's "My New Year's Resolutions." But it turned a profit only in the postwar boom years of 1945 and 1946 and sank soon afterward, the victim of advertising atrophy.

The new Liberty will not be revived, exactly, but reissued in quarterly form at 75-c- a copy, featuring old Liberty covers, stories, even ads. Advertisers who used the old Liberty will be offered free space to run bygone ads beside their new ones (at $3,000 per black-and-white page). The first issues will have a press run of 400,000 copies, and include, among others, the Gandhi and Garbo stories. Chief resuscitator of the magazine is Robert Whiteman, 45, a soft-spoken entrepreneur who once sold Liberty door-to-door in Savannah, Ga., and purchased the remnants in 1965. Into the bargain went 1,387 covers and some 17,000 pieces of editorial material, enough, Whiteman figures, "to last us 100 years, even if we go monthly."

Twenty First Century Communications (Weight Watchers, National Lampoon), which will publish the revenant Liberty, is counting on alumni loyalty to take up any advertising slack. "We can make it on single-issue sales alone," says Vice President George Agoglia, "if even half of the one million Liberty salesboys are still alive."

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