o'brien's mentor
That title came to me as the subject of an email, and my first thought was that it was the title of an English country dance. My second thought was that it had something to do with Star Trek.

The tangent of late has been to try to get rid of some of the red on my LIW/RWL bibliography. Over thirty articles were mined this month, but at least two dozen were added that I don't have copies of. Darn.

It took a while to track down Rose Wilder Lane's articles from World Traveler magazine. It took a tangent to the April 31, 1930, issue of Time magazine article to figure it out:

Martin's Mentor

Crowell Publishing Co. employes found an announcement on their bulletin board one morning last week, which read: "The Company has sold The Mentor to the World Traveler Magazine Corp. - George R. Martin, publisher. They will assume the publishing of The Mentor, beginning with the June 1930 issue. We have become convinced that The Mentor will have a much better opportunity if handled by a publisher equipped to take care of the smaller units. Here we are fully and thoroughly geared up to handle large units and it has become difficult to give The Mentor the necessary small unit attention. We feel that Mr. Martin and his organization are equipped to continue The Mentor successfully."

Although Crowell had owned The Mentor since 1920, it was not until last autumn that it was resolved to dress the magazine up and try to make it sell. Founded in 1913, the earliest known Mentor was a weekly. Each issue was devoted to one particular cultural subject- art, travel, letters. Foliowise, it also contained several loose-leaf rotogravure art reproductions. Then it became a semimonthly, then a monthly. Last September it fell into the capable hands of Hugh Anthony Leamy, a onetime associate editor of Collier's.

Editor Leamy decided to keep his editorial matter— essays, fiction, humor— consistent with the oldtime Mentor, but to deck out the material with capable, sometimes racy, illustration. Although the magazine's circulation reached 85,000, it became apparent that it would never pull in harness with its whopping big Crowell team-mates —Woman's Home Companion, Collier's, The Country Home (onetime Farm & Fireside), The American Magazine — whose combined circulation is over 8,500,000.

To World Traveler, the Mentor went lock, stock & barrel— with the exception of Editor Leamy. Henceforth he will work for Hearst's American Weekly, Sunday supplement whose circulation is greater than that of any other periodically printed matter (over 6,000,000).

Publisher Martin contemplates fusing his old magazine with his new, placing the amalgam under the direction of World Traveler's Editor Charles P. Norcross, now junketing in the Orient. Because World Traveler has about one-fourth of its stablemate's distribution, and because when two magazines combine one inevitably swallows the other, publishers guessed that the ever-mutating Mentor would be the one to endure.

All this means is that World Traveler magazine is often filed under Mentor. But the fun doesn't stop there.

The articles listed in some references as being by Rose Wilder Lane are attributed to Frederick O'Brien in other places, and to both as authors in yet others.
- posted by pioneergirl at 12:25 PM