Page:1954 Juvenile Delinquency Testimony.pdf/180

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JUVENILE DELINQUENCY

applied to our magazines for advertising-space purposes. It is his- toric in our business to sell the advertising space in our magazines, whether they be comic or conventional style, on a group basis if you have two or more magazines as a publisher.

Mr. Beaser. Let me get the organizational structure a little clearer. How many corporations constitute Magazine Management Co.?

Mr. Froehlich. Magazine Management Co, owns stock in approximately 35 corporations.

Mr. Beaser. Those corporations are in charge of the publication of the comic books, the other books similar to this?

Mr. Froehlich. Yes, sir; we publish a wide variety of conventional magazines, hunting and fishing magazines. We have a book devoted to the automobile, a magazine called Auto Age, with styling features, and soon. In addition we have television magazines as well as a half dozen of the conventional motion-picture fan-type magazines.

Mr. Beaser. Do you distribute, yourself, these magazines you publish?

Mr. Froehlich. Yes, sir. We have a wholly owned distributing company called Atlas Magazines, Inc. The stock in that corporation is held by the publishing corporations, and we distribute ne magazines other than those we publish ourselves. We are a publisher-distributor,

Mr. Beaser. Both?

Mr. Froehlich. Yes, sir.

Mr. Beaser. What you would call an independent distributor?

Mr. Froehlich. We distribute through the independent wholesalers in the United States.

Mr. Beaser. Do you distribtue any comic-book magazines other than those which you publish?

Mr. Froehlich. No, sir, no magazines published by other pub- lishers. We distribute only our magazines through Atlas, our wholly owned subsidiary distributing company.

Mr. Beaser. You distribute to independent wholesalers in various cities?

Mr. Froehlich. Yes, sir; exactly as Curtis, McCall Co.

Mr. Beaser. Can you give us the approximate size, as far as the comic books are concerned, of the monthly distribution?

Mr. Froehlich. I believe I can give you an average, based on the last 6 months of the printed orders. I would say approximately 10 million.

Mr. Beaser. A month?

Mr. Froehlich. A month, divided into roughly 30 to 35 titles per month.

Mr. Beaser. And of what variety are they, what kind of comics?

Mr. Froehlich. If I may have a moment I can give you the exact information on that. I understood you were interested primarily in the weird and so-called crime comics.

Mr. Beaser. Crime and horror comics.

Mr. Froehlich. I would like to have the right, if I may, to expand on that, because that is a very small segment of our total comic output. We publish approximately 4 to 5—it varies because of the frequency variations from time to time—so-called weird or fantastic or science fiction type of comics per month. That is out of a total