The file is exhausted after you call readlines, as in subsequent calls to readlines will not read more lines as all the lines have been read. The inner loop with then execute but have nothing to do. If you want to read the lines 52 times and print r (I do not know why - but ok), do the following
with open('simpletextfile.txt') as f:
lines = f.readlines()
for r in range(1, 52):
for line in lines:
print r
Furthermore, although you are only reading the file in this example (and Python will close it automatically for you), you should explicitly .close() it yourself or wrap it around a with statement as above, which will close it at the end - it is less sloppy.