The Press: New Editor for Collier’s

Collier’s got a new editor last week. To succeed the late Charles Colebaugh, a Collier’s man for 27 years who died last week, Publisher William Ludlow Chenery chose a comparative newcomer: 42-year-old Henry La Cossitt. Big-shouldered, vigorous Henry La Cossitt has been Collier’s managing editor for a mere four months, has been associated with the Crowell-Collier Publishing Co. (as fiction editor of the American Magazine) only three years.

But Editor La Cossitt is no tyro in his field. Trained at the University of Missouri’s journalism school, he was a reporter on the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the St.

Louis Post-Dispatch, a subeditor for the Manhattan publishing house of Doubleday, Doran, and for five years (after a stint of movie writing in Hollywood) a story scout for 20th Century-Fox films.

He caught the Chenery eye when he skill fully engineered a change in the American’s appeal from masculine to feminine.

Since La Cossitt arrived, the American’s circulation has risen from 2,291,758 to 2,557,208.

Editor La Cossitt plans no changes in the tone of Collier’s (wartime circulation ceiling: 2,860,000). His immediate task is smart coverage of invaded Europe. He has some star reporters for this crucial job: William B. Courtney and Martha Gellhorn are already in England. Soon to join them is Reporter Gellhorn’s husband, who has succeeded in making literature out of war reporting, burly, newly-bearded Ernest Hemingway.