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These quarters the editors shared with the newborn Saturday Review of Literature. Partitions between the two offices did not reach to the ceiling and sometimes TIME'S editors were disturbed by jovial Christopher Morley coming to call on the Saturday Review's editors (Dr. Henry Seidel Canby, Amy Loveman, William Rose Benét), bringing his welcome in the form of a bottle of whiskey which he opened by pounding on a desk until its cork came out.
Here TIME'S three chief writers shared a long narrow cell barely big enough for three desks end to end. The editor sat at a desk in a large room surrounded by smaller desks for typists and half-a-dozen college girls (at one time from Smith, at others from Mt. Holyoke, Vassar, Wellesley)—the beginnings of a research staff.
There, in a sort of perpetual frenzy, writers' stories were edited, torn apart, checked and made over.
Even then, despite its small staff, TIME kept its readers abreast of the news, if not ahead of it. During the first six months TIME'S cover subjects included not only the figures of 1923 (Uncle Joe Cannon, Warren Harding, Eleanor Duse, King Fuad, Hugo Stinnes, Andrew Mellon, E. M. House) but some who belong very much to 1938: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mustafa Kamâl Attatürk, Burton K. Wheeler, Benito Mussolini, John L. Lewis.
Not always did subscribers agree with TIME'S cover selections. Many questioned the importance of Benito Mussolini, John Lewis, Franklin Roosevelt.
Financial Desert. Although advised that TIME could not properly be launched with less than $1,000,000 capital, Editors Luce and Hadden started with only $85,000. This they obtained by selling preferred and a little common stock in TIME Inc.* to citizens who had more faith that a newsmagazine would be a public service than that it would be a financial success.
At one uncomfortable moment toward the end of TIME'S second year (when circulation reached 80,760), cash in the till shrank to $5,000, enough for only a few days' operations. That, however, was due mainly to a shortage of working capital in a growing concern. It passed and a few weeks later the preferred shareholders subscribed to another stock issue doubling the company's original capital.
Slowly but surely the magazine gained readers and advertisers. Yet when TIME was nearly three years old (circulation: 105,530), Editor Luce spent two hours one evening walking around Manhattan's Bryant Park with an old friend debating whether he and Editor Hadden could afford to raise their own salaries to $50 a week (their writers already were paid more). He decided they would be justified in doing it. But so ingrained was the habit of plowing back profits into the improvement of the magazine that not until 1929 (circulation: 243,400) could enough money be spared to pay the first dividend on the preferred stock. None was paid on common stock until 1930. By then TIME'S loyal family of readers numbered 307,-528—187 of whom had paid $60 apiece for lifetime subscriptions (no longer sold).