Century's End

Less than a year ago gentle, cultured Century magazine found the world moving at "too fast a pace," changed its own periodicity from monthly to quarterly (TIME, Aug. 5). Despite the proud note in Editor Hewitt Hanson Howland's announcement that "Century proposes to take the first move" toward more leisurely living, observers suspected a prelude to surrender. Last week the 60-year-old Century was taken over by its robust monthly neighbor, Forum, bustling "magazine of controversy."

Purchase by Forum afforded faltering Century honorable refuge from a life which, while eminently respectable, had become in recent years a burden. It was after the death in 1881 of Editor Josiah Gilbert Holland (cofounder with Roswell Smith) that Century reached the zenith of its editorial command. Then, under Editor Richard Watson Gilder, it scored its journalistic triumph with the serial life of Lincoln, by Nicolay & Hay, and a Civil War battle series written by the most important participants. Circulation reached its peak of 150,000 in 1906. Followed a gentle but inexorable decline which not even energetic Editor Glenn Frank (now president of University of Wisconsin) could completely check.

Circulation dwindled to 31,000 in 1925; 22,000 in 1928; less than 20,000 this year. Once a favored advertising medium, member of the self-respecting "Quality Group,"* Century carried in its spring issue only five pages of advertising other than its own publisher's.

Forum, with its 90,000 circulation and bountiful advertising, has little to gain by the merger, save to clear its cluttered field of one element of competition, and speed the swing of public taste away from the Victorian "genteel literary magazine" toward the virile, provocative medium for present-day skeptics. The joint title, Forum & Century will not affect its tactics while Editor Henry Goddard Leach remains.

The same restless attitude of public mind that brought defeat to Century made for Forum's success. Sixteen years Century's junior, Forum was founded by Isaac L. Rice, edited first by Lorettus Sutton Metcalf, next by famed Walter Hines Page. A succession of editors led in 1923 to Mr. Leach, under whose direction Forum has more than tripled the highest circulation of Page's time.

*Quality Group, comprised of Century, Harper's, Scribner's, World's Work, Review of Reviews, Atlantic Monthly endeavored to induce advertisers to purchase space in the entire group. It disintegrated in 1928, partly because of disagreements over page-size; partly because the "strong" members wearied of carrying the "weak."

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