The trustees of the Harvard Advocate are about to begin a fund drive designed to turn Harvard's poverty stricken literary magazine into the most affluent publication at the College.

The drive, aimed at Advocate alumni, will establish a trust fund to help repair the Advocate building, to hire a full-time secretary-bookkeeper, and to create a "matching fund" to help keep the magazine from losing money on individual pauses.

If the drive is successful, the matching fund will provide as much money for each issue of the magazine as the editors raise through sales and advertising.

The fund will virtually ensure that the Advocate stays out of debt. No other college publication operates under such an arrangement. The drive may also permit the Advocate, more-or-loss a quarterly in recent years, to resume its old six-issues-a-year publication schedule.

Goal To Be Set

No dollars-and-cents goal for the drive has been set yet; a total will be named after the trustees confer with Dean Watson next month.

Outgoing president Gerald P. Hillman said yesterday that he hopes the money will be raised before the Advocate's hundredth anniversary, in May, 1966.

Since World War II the magazine's financial crises have been chronic; Hillman inherited a $3300 debt, which he attributed to "the Advocate policy of throwing anything that looks like a business letter into the business office and then locking the door."

The debt has now been virtually eliminated, thanks to gifts from the trustees and a 200 per cent increase in circulation (which was down to "about 60" a year ago, Hillman said). The magazine has also been converted from a lengthy, 6-by-8 book costing 75 cents to a new, 8-by-11, click-paper format, with a new price of 25 to 35 cents.

The Advocate's trustees, chaired by Roy E. Larsen '21, chairman of the executive committee of Time. Inc., Include two other business executives, two magazine editors, and Samuel E. Ordway Jr. '21, chairman of the Conservation Foundation