Word: grosvenors
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Soon after graduating from Amherst College, Gilbert fell in love with Elsie May Bell, daughter of Telephone Inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who was president of the National Geographic Society. When Bell offered Grosvenor a job on the Geographic, he took it (just to be near
...turn-of-the-century Geographic was a stodgy scientific journal, written with old-fashioned portentousness, and floundering in debt. Grosvenor stuck to the pattern for six years. One day in 1905, a packet of photographs from Tibet landed on his desk. Grosvenor was fascinated by the rugged Tibetan scenery and the Dalai Lama's palace. On an impulse, he spread the pictures across eleven pages. The issue created a sensation: almost by accident, Grosvenor had discovered how to make geography popular...
What the Lama Brought. Insubsequent issues, Editor Grosvenor has stretched his romantic, unscientific definition of geography to cover everything under (and above) the sun. To the Geographic, geography means kites and cats, ostriches and insanity, the Bagdad market and the Berlin airlift, eruptions of volcanoes, bathyspheres and the stratosphere, fishing, fine arts and the sex life of savages. Peripatetic, insatiably curious Gilbert Grosvenor has written 300 articles and taken 200 of the photographs. He was the first U.S. editor to use natural color photographs (a 24-page spread on China and Korea...
...fund of $10 million, mostly from the Geographic's tax-free earnings (it is classed as an educational institution). Besides the magazine, the society also publishes books, bulletins and maps, maintains a 20,000-volume library, sponsors geographic lectures and underwrites scientific expeditions. Grateful explorers have named after Grosvenor a Greenland sea shell, an Antarctic mountain range, an Alaskan lake, a Chinese plant and a Peruvian fish...
...Editor Grosvenor wields an autocratic blue pencil, even on articles written for the Geographic by U.S. Presidents, e.g., Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, Coolidge and Hoover. Most articles and "legends" (captions) are written by the studious, well-paid editorial staff of 149. Grosvenor sets the tone, which is frequently florid, sometimes quaint, always polite. Says Grosvenor: "We prefer to print only what is of a kindly nature." He has even found a friendly word to say for wasps...