Cousins' Second Coming

A few months after he walked away from Saturday Review because of serious disagreements with its new owners, Editor Norman Cousins founded World, a biweekly that strongly resembles the old SR. The revamped SR, converted into four monthlies, later went bankrupt. Now, to his considerable satisfaction, Cousins is taking over the remnants of that venture. Last week he was called away from World's first birthday party to participate in a second coming. He signed papers making official the merger of Saturday Review and World. Cousins and World paid Saturday Review creditors $500,000 and assumed liabilities for outstanding subscriptions. The move will expand World's present biweekly circulation of 178,000 to more than 950,000−a gargantuan increase that Cousins has no intention of maintaining for long: "The motto here is 'We're at a million and shooting for 550,000.' "

He figures to keep the 350,000 long-term Saturday Review readers who mostly date back to his days as editor. But he will not strive to retain the 400,000 who signed on for one or more of the short-lived SR monthlies produced by Nicholas Charney and John Veronis. Cousins will peg ad rates at a 550,000 base and offer advertisers almost 400,000 more readers as a temporary bonus. The first joint issue will appear Sept. 11.

Meanwhile, Cousins has sent a badly needed letter of explanation to all Saturday Review subscribers, some of whom signed up for a weekly, received four monthlies for a time, and will now be getting a biweekly.