DATE: Sunday, August 17, 1997               TAG: 9708150037

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J5   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS

DATELINE: RICHMOND                          LENGTH:   82 lines

DO NOT DISCARD MAPPING A LOVE OF NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

The memory still triggers a guilt attack.

There I was on an end-of-school Saturday morning last June, dust cloth in hand, piles of half-used notebooks, unopened PTA notices and wilted crayons blocking my path.

With executive resolve, I surveyed the scene, scooped up an armload of crumpled homework and budding-Van Gogh doodles and deposited them unceremoniously in the trash. What happened next, I blame on temporary insanity.

High on a cleaning frenzy, I entered the bathroom, where a stack of National Geographics spiraled toward the medicine cabinet. Without blinking, I did what I have never done before - gathered up a dozen, and marched straight to the recycling bin. Plop.

By the time I was hit by the crassness of my act, it was too late for amends. Egad! Fifteen years from now, when a good friend is searching for the April 1997 issue to complete her floor-to-ceiling collection, I will have to avert my eyes and mumble something about the dog or the children or dry rot.

The only worse thought is that, decades hence, there might be no floor-to-ceiling collections. No children transforming mundane reports on Borneo or the Dead Sea with stunning photographs clipped and pasted from a National Geographic. No teen-ager being transported from a dusty corner of her grandmother's house to Istanbul or Taipei via the glossy slickness of a Geographic page.

For decades, National Geographic was one of the great equalizers in American society. It instilled in children from Appalachia to Hyde Park a sense of awe for far-off places and natural wonders. To be sure, the nastier parts of the human condition got short shrift. But there were plenty of other journals dealing with those.

Now, times are changing at the offices of the National Geographic Society, clustered along 16th, 17th and M Streets in Washington, D.C. And the angst the change is causing, far and wide, says much about the way in which the magazine has been woven into the fabric of 20th century America.

A la Disney, the Society is expanding here, contracting there, adding product lines and corporate divisions, rethinking costly conceits (the pages already are thinner, expedition schedules are reportedly less generous), and focusing on a place that never before seemed to matter much: the bottom line.

That's because the National Geographic Society, operating as a non-profit agency, has for years relied on memberships and donations (and tax breaks) to keep it in the green. Lately, however, membership has dipped. Finances have looked a bit less robust.

One result is that the society in 1994 formed a taxable, for-profit subsidiary known as National Geographic Ventures. It is spinning out projects faster than the shutter speed on a top-of-the-line camera.

The New York Times reported recently that discussions are under way with movie studios for developing full-length feature films. A CD-ROM featuring 3,000 best-of-the-Geographic photos (the modern way to illustrate those school reports) is on sale, and plans for a computerized collection of every back issue is in the works.

A retail store is due to open this fall at Washington National Airport. A guide to national parks is planned with a Colorado company that is the organization's first-ever acquisition. Road maps and travel atlases will be marketed through another new partnership, as will a variety of television programs. And so forth.

What worries old-timers is that the Society's longstanding commitment to let writers and photographers work at their own speed may be lost, or that the for-profit ventures will come to outweigh the more traditional ones.

Reading of the changes, a realization struck home.

It's the rare New Yorker or Atlantic Monthly or Newsweek that stays long around my house. But when my sister and I begin cleaning out our father's farmhouse in a few weeks, one family treasure will be a bookcase full of National Geographics.

I'll try to find them a home - along with Cousin Morgan's arrowhead paintings and the cardboard creche that reappeared, ever more shakily, each Yuletide. Carting all those yellow rectangles off to the dump would be too depressing, too much like abandoning a family pet or an old friend.

How do you compute ``collective guilt'' on a flow chart of assets and net worth? I don't know. But the editorial and business wizards at National Geographic Society might keep it in mind when they're planning for the new millenium.

Such loyalty can't be measured in dollars and cents. But something tells me it's priceless. MEMO: Ms. Edds is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.

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