The Press: St. Nicholas to Woolworth's

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In the gaslit era before cinema and radio, St. Nicholas was the No. 1 U. S. magazine for young people. Like the old quarry where swimming was forbidden, like the first ice on the pond in winter, it was an essential part of childhood—a storehouse of fruitful articles and hair-raising fiction for adolescents.

Many a youth last week had never heard of St. Nicholas, many a grown-up had forgotten it still existed. But alive it was, though senescent. Last week St. Nicholas, 66 years old, withdrew its foot from the grave, took a new lease on life, and went on sale exclusively in 112 F. W. Woolworth stores as a picture magazine for elementary grade-school children.

Thus passed into virtual oblivion the St. Nicholas that had nourished some of the major talents of a past generation. To St. Nicholas in 1886 young Richard Harding Davis sold his first story, about football at Princeton. For St. Nicholas Rudyard Kipling wrote Just So Stories, Mark Twain Tom Sawyer Abroad, Louisa May Alcott Under the Lilacs, Frances Hodgson Burnett Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Founded in 1873 by Charles Scribner's Sons, then taken over by the Century Co., St. Nicholas began to decline after World War I as children turned to movies, radio, comic strips, and children's tastes grew steadily more sophisticated. To hold its market St. Nicholas lowered its age appeal year by year. Still circulation dropped: from a onetime high of around 100,000 it was down to less than 25,000 last year.

In 1934 St. Nicholas passed into the hands of stocky, dynamic President Roy Walker of Educational Publishing Corp. Publisher Walker wanted it as a classroom adjunct to The Grade Teacher, trade journal for educators. Then last year Woolworth's began to look around for new magazines to replace the 5-&-10¢store Tower Group, which had just sunk in a morass of financial trouble and scandal.

Seven Tower magazines (devoted to movies and radio, home and children, love and mystery) had shared a total circulation of some 900,000 copies before a Federal Grand Jury indicted Publisher Catherine McNelis for using the mails to defraud. (Case is still pending.) One of the best had been Tiny Tower for children, with around 150,000 readers.

As a successor to Tiny Tower, St. Nicholas went into Woolworth stores last week. Its price was cut from 25¢ to 10¢. It sported a bright two-color format like Tiny Tower's. Oldtime readers of St. Nicholas would never have recognized its pages, filled with crude, bold drawings of camels and hippopotamuses and monkeys, pictures to be cut out and mounted, nursery fables in the style of Thornton Burgess.

Sole remaining feature of the old magazine is the St. Nicholas League, a department for child contributors. Started in 1900, the League published early stories, poems and drawings by Robert Benchley, Stephen Vincent Benét, Robert Edmond Jones, Edna St. Vincent Millay.