Monday, Jul. 21, 1980
Harper's Reborn
At 130, a new foundation
Its August issue, featuring a cover story on a TV evangelist, was to have been its last. Instead it will be the first for a born-again Harper's (circ. 325,000), the nation's oldest monthly, at age 130. Just three weeks after the announcement that it would fold came word of its rescue by a pair of private foundations.
The save was engineered by the $750 million John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, set up by the legendary Chicago insurance and real estate Midas before his death in 1978. The MacArthur group will pay the purchase price, reportedly about $250,000, to the parent Minneapolis Star and Tribune Co., and assume the magazine's subscription liability of some $3 million. But it will share the magazine's operating costs with the Atlantic Richfield Foundation, whose donor, ARCO, four years ago bailed out another pauper of the press, Britain's Sunday Observer.
The new owners of Harper's plan to retain Editor Lewis Lapham, 45, and hope to return the magazine to solvency by converting it to a nonprofit organization, which will bring tax breaks and reduced postal rates. MacArthur family members note that John D. saved a money loser called Theater Arts magazine in 1950. Its editor was his older brother, Newsman-Playwright Charles MacArthur, who wrote The Front Page.
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