THE BANDWAGON

The movement by the so-called quality magazines to gain the attention of the culturally middle classes has been a growing success. It began quietly enough eighteen months ago when the editors of the Atlantic Monthly discovered that as long as they confined their letters of subscription solicitation to college graduates, their returns averaged only one subscription to one hundred letters. But when the butchers and bakers and candlestick makers were added to the mailing lists, the average jumped to twelve per hundred.

Then came the tacit admission in advertising form that the millions who pay a dime to hang on an enameled strap might like to cast their eyes upward and see the attractions of the current number. The man in the street noticed that the magazines which he had hitherto correctly stigmatized as highbrow now contained opinions of dominant people on controversial matters. The articles had a pleasant downrightness as different from the style of the newspaper editorial writer as a dopester's diagnosis before a fight is unrecognizable twenty-four hours later in the same dopester turned raconteur. The magazine publisher's eye was not, like that of many newspapermen, upon circulations retained by editorials palely loitering on the outskirts of the true issue. He believed in the verity of Walter Hines Page's idea: "The way to make any publication succeed is to make people talk about it. If you can't make them like it, make them hate it. Just so they talk about it. . . ."

The publications once chifly with in barren intellectualism have hastened to clamber aboard the bandwagon of Literature for the Many. A mild miracle has taken place, for with incentives quite mercenary the editors have done a literary good turn.