The Press: Reverse English

When chipper, billiards-playing Graham Creighton Patterson* stepped in to run the Farm Journal in 1935 (backed by the copious cash of arch-Republicans Joseph and Howard Pew), its circulation was clotted at 1,100.000, its size at 16 to 18 pages. Its bookkeeping was done in red. This month's 72-page Farm Journal and Farmer's Wife (wed in 1939) went to more than 2,700,000 subscribers, and Patterson chalked his cue for a long reverse shot. Success had frozen his cue ball fast against the paper shortage.

From his Philadelphia headquarters to 100,000 subscribers in cities of more than 25,000 population went an urgent plea: cancel your subscription temporarily so a food-producing farmer may have your copy, "to get the Farm Journal into the hands of those who could get the greatest value out of it." FJ's pledge: to resume subscriptions after the emergency for the number of months paid (at 50^ for two years).

Publisher Patterson had run up against demand that would have upped circulation by 50.000 a month. He had trimmed the magazine's page-size, thinned its paper, rejected ads worth-$1 million before coming to his "stand-aside" plea to urban readers.

At week's end Patterson's selling-in-reverse shot was on its way to the clicking point. Of the first 100,000 subscribers canvassed, 69,596 had responded: 50,173 agreed to stand aside (some 400 of them named a farmer to whom to send the released copy). But 19,423 city-dwelling readers who, unlike Patterson, either operate a farm or hope to some day, stoutly refused to give up Farm Journal and Farmer's Wife.