New Mentor

So that a few worthy persons might "learn one thing every day," William David Moffat, onetime Scribner executive, in 1912 gathered a group of learned men about him to dispense information. He called the group the Mentor Association and the dispensing medium, then hardly more than a pamphlet, The Mentor. In the group were such specialists as the late great Luther Burbank (plants), Augustus Thomas (plays), Daniel Carter Beard (outdoor life), Roger M. Babson (figures), Fritz Kreisler (music). Like its organizers, The Mentor itself was a specialist, devoted each issue to a single topic.

Editor Moffat never aimed at mass-circulation. Even when mass-circularizing Crowell Publishing Co. (American Magazine, Colliers, Woman's Home Companion) bought The Mentor in 1920, it did not commercialize original Mentor ideals, but retained Editor Moffat, continued to please the 50,000, the 70,000, finally the 100,000 who liked The Mentor for what it was.

But Editor Moffat began to reach the retiring age. Passing 60, he found the editorship strenuous. Some months ago he talked the matter over with Crowell President Lee Wilder Maxwell, with Collier's Executive Director Thomas Hambly Beck. He discovered that they, too, had been thinking of a change. Last week Editor Moffat, 63, retired.

Starting with the next (September) issue, The Mentor will no longer have a theme-subject. Instead there will be articles on many a different topic, by such authors as Walter Davenport, W. E. Woodward, Margaret Widdemer, Will Durant. There will be seven four-color pages in place of rotogravure; a cover in the "modern manner"; a history of tennis by William Tatem Tilden, 2nd; a history of dog fashions by Albert Payson Terhune.

To make The Mentor youthful, Crowell Publishing Co. has put a youthful man in the editorship, Hugh Anthony Leamy, just past 30, round-faced, amiable, onetime New York Sun reporter, for the last three years an associate editor of Collier's. About The Mentor, what its plans are, he will talk with hopeful enthusiasm. About new Editor Leamy he is reticent. "I'm still an untried man at this job," he explains. "But The Mentor? Well, you know, we thought it best to go through with a big change all at once to keep it up with the changing times. . . . You might call the new Mentor a nonfiction, up-to-date magazine for people who want to learn about various matters, but who want to be amused at the same time--not bored."