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School Arts
The Art Education Magazine
Editor
D. Kenneth Winebrenner. 400 Woodland Drive. Buffalo 23, New York

March 9, 1957

Professor Hale Woodruff
Art Education Department
New York University
School of Education
Washington Square
New York 3, New York

Dear Hale:

Thanks for your note. You are doing an excellent job... just what we expected. Almost all your readers will either be making their own art efforts or will be mainly oriented to school art through their work as teachers. Therefore, I think it is not only proper, but even highly desirable to drop a word or two relating the subject to school art when the inference is pretty clear. It could be even conceivable that in some cases it may be possible to reproduce a child's work if there is some obvious relationship between his efforts and the work of the artist featured. Nobody is really doing this kind of thing, so feel free to experiment and try different approaches; discarding them if you feel they do not work out, etc.

In many ways one page is really not enough. Yet, I feel that you have done more on the one page in relating the work to school needs and getting on the level of the reader than another magazine does in two pages with no more if as much text but more white space and a larger illustration. I feel that the length of your test is about right, and the main advantage of two pages would be larger reproductions; perhaps a facing page of a full-size illustration. Going into two pages would probably require a re-examination of where the feature should be in the issue, and I would want to talk this over with the Worcester staff. In establishing a tentative location (page 39*) in the average 48-page issue, we felt that we would be able to build a habit of looking for it in the same place as works out well with the other regular one-page features. The location was selected as an experiment, in order to break up the section which is predominantly advertising.

When I took over School Arts, the advertising was "wrapped around" the article section, with a great many pages in front of the first article and other pages at the end. We finally convinced the Worcester people that the reader preferred to get into the articles right away and not have to wade through advertising. The various features and the "Items of Interest" columns written by the business and advertising staff break up the ads, and the book reviews, beginning teacher, questions you ask, and editorial features carry the interest through the magazine. The major weakness we have recognized has been the grouping of two many ads in the section immediately following the articles. Let's see if your page in this location helps break this up, and also whether it looks as if we should consider another location.