New World's Worker

The turn of the century found the young firm of Doubleday, Page & Co. about to publish a new magazine. Partner Walter Hines Page was to be editor. The magazine was to concern itself with the "activities of the newly organized world, its problems and even its romances." Assisting in early discussions of policy and in the selection of a name was a young man, Russell Doubleday, 28, ten years the junior of his publisher-brother Frank Nelson Doubleday.

The name chosen was World's Work. Able Editor Page needed little assistance and young Russell Doubleday turned his attention to the book-publishing end of the firm's business. But always he kept an interested eye on World's Work, wrote articles for it, was its advertising manager for a season.

Walter Hines Page died in 1918 after serving as U. S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. Succeeding him as Editor of World's Work have been his son Arthur Wilson Page, Burton Jesse Hendrick, Edgar French Strother, and most lately, Barton Wood Currie, onetime editor of Ladies Home Journal. Last year Doubleday, Page & Co. ceased to be exclusively the Doubleday family business, by merging with the business of Book Publisher George H. Doran. Last week, in an objective sort of way, Doubleday, Doran & Co. announced that Russell Doubleday was to step in and edit World's Work.

The histories of Doubleday, Page & Co. and World's Work have not been parallel. The company has always prospered. The magazine has, as magazines will, languished from time to time.

Editor Doubleday's first announcement was to say that World's Work would revert to First Editor Page's principles. He promised that its oldtime "March of Events" section would again take its place in the front pages. Admitting that the magazine had "fallen by the wayside," Editor Doubleday promised renewed vigor, interest, progressiveness under his leadership. Also he told of two biographies soon forth-coming--one of the late great Myron T. Herrick, one of Banker-Ambassador Henry Morgenthau. When a new caddy joins the caddy-shed gang at the Piping Rock Club on Long Island, one of the first persons he learns to recognize is a very tall, very lean, very sunburned man with a decided aquiline nose, a pleasant smile. "That's Russell Doubleday," the new caddy is told. "He's a swell guy." The new caddy soon learns that though Mr. Doubleday plays golf only a little under 100, "swell guy" is a good description.

Further along Long Island from his Glen Cove home are two other Doubleday estates, at Oyster Bay. One belongs to Editor Doubleday's leonine elder brother, Frank Nelson Doubleday, now virtually retired, no longer a lordly yachtsman, but still a man-of-the-world, a bookish correspondent with the great and near-great (Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Edward Lawrence, Richard LeGallienne). Nearby lives Nelson Doubleday of the second generation, Frank Nelson's son. He has the family height and sunburn, and his father's imperious air. He plays tennis by day, ping-pong in the evenings. His business fame rests upon the mail-order technique which he developed to sell such books as The Pocket Nature Library, The Pocket University, Forty Thousand Questions, Encyclopedia of Etiquette. Christopher Morley, hearty Doubleday-Doran author, often visits and compliments Mrs. Nelson on her knowledge of landscape gardening. Not content with beautifying her own country place, she has supervised the land scaping of Doubleday, Doran's Country Life Press at Garden City, L. I.