In Manhattan, the 35 staffers of Science Illustrated had just put the August issue to bed last week and were hard at work on the September issue. In the midst of the job, they were summoned from their desks to the paneled board room of Manhattan's McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. Announced Publisher Paul Montgomery: "I have a piece of bad news this morning." The news: there would not be any September issue—or any August issue, either, even though the presses were ready to roll. Without making a move to telegraph its knockout punch, McGraw-Hill had closed out the biggest, slickest and most expensive of its 34 magazines.*
For three years, picture-packed Science
Illustrated had given monthly science lessons (at 25¢ an issue) to the "educated layman"; by last month, 35-year-old Editor John Whiting had enrolled an impressive 531,000 readers in his correspondence course. But right from the start, Science Illustrated had been deep in the red. McGraw-Hill, which aims most of its soberly successful, specialized magazines at comparatively small markets, found it a tougher trick to sell Science Illustrated to mass-market advertisers. All told, staffers estimated that McGraw-Hill had dropped several million dollars on the experiment in science.
The folding left the scientific field dominated by money-making Popular Science (circ. 1,170,000) and Popular Mechanics (circ. 1,035,000), which turn out easily understood science news for their educated laymen, gadgets and shop hints for the young and the mechanically minded. But Science Illustrated's readers were more likely to shift to the recently revivified, upper-middlebrow Scientific American (circ. 83,000).
*McGraw-Hill (Business Week, Aviation Week, Factory Management and Maintenance) did a $42 million business last year, is one of the top U.S. publishers of textbooks and scientific works.