ON THE DEATH OF NUMISMATIC SCRAPBOOK MAGAZINE

I was working at Coin World in early 1976 when Numismatic Scrapbook was axed, and the in-house scuttlebutt at the time was this. Amos Press had originally been contracted by Scrapbook founder Lee Hewitt in the 1960's to print NSM for him. He later sold the publication to Amos Press in the late 1960's.

Printing NSM required the purchase of a certain type of press to handle that particular magazine format. Because the press was idle much of the month, Amos Press started World Coins Magazine in the same format to utilize the down time for the press. When I started working for Amos Press in December of 1973, I was an advertising proofreader who read ads for CW, NSM and WCM. Several staff members routinely worked two weeks on NSM, then two weeks on WCN, then back to NSM. The overhead of the two magazines was thus spread out over both.

Krause Publications' new World Coin News newspaper (I think it was biweekly then) deeply cut into WCN's monthly business, just as CW's weekly format had deeply cut into NSM's monthly business back in the 60's. By 1975 WCN was losing money, while NSM was making slightly more money than WCN was losing (or so we heard). As a pair they were pretty much a wash.

After an attempt in 1975 to promote NSM to the point where it might stand alone, a financial decision was made in January of 1976 to eliminate WCN. Since this would have dumped all of the overhead on NSM to the point where it would now be operating at a greater loss than the preceding joint operation, it was decided to axe NSM at the same time. Several editorial and production people were laid off.

NSM and WCN features continued in CW for a while, but eventually just faded away.

To read an earlier E-Sylum article, see: QUERY: COIN WORLD NUMISMATIC SCRAPBOOK SECTIONS (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v14n50a05.html)

Wayne Homren, Editor

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