American News Company (one of the last surviving trusts of the 20th century)

Beautifully engraved SPECIMEN certificate from the American News Company. This historic document was printed by the Security Banknote Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of a statue of an early paperboy with an allegorical man and woman on each side.


Certificate Vignette



American News was the country's major news stand distributor -- a wholesaler headquartered in New York with over 400 regional distribution centers answering to it. Created, as its name suggests, to handle the distribution of major urban dailies at the turn of the century, it also carried the major weekly and monthly periodicals. More important, it carried all of them on an exclusive basis. No publisher could expect to appear on a stand supplied by American News if that publisher sent his material anywhere else. Nor would it be easy to find good locations elsewhere. American News possessed a wholly owned subsidiary, the Union News Company, that had made over 900 contracts with railroad terminals, large hotels, and other prime news stand locations -- all again with exclusivity. Until it was broken by the courts as a "combination in restraint of trade", it was one of last surviving trusts of the early 20th century.

The American News Company was found guilty of restraint of trade in 1957 and it was forced to divest itself of its newsstands. The effect on the US magazine market was catastrophic. Many magazines had to switch to one of the independent distributors, who were able to set their own conditions for taking on new business. This often forced the magazines to change from a digest size to a larger format, and to become monthly rather than bimonthly or quarterly. Many magazines could not afford to make these changes, both of which required either high circulation or a strong advertising base, and many magazines folded as a result.