Gentlemen-It was my intention to spend about $80 with you, but since receiving your last communication I have decided to deal elsewhere. I am not in sympathy with the spelling reform movement, and when I waded through your letter and had to pause at "thru" and "thoroly," and "catalog" and "wisht," etc., I got mad and destroyed your price list.Our Silent Partner. Watch a man's face when he finds a particularly attractive car card. It brightens, and you can almost see him making a mental note of the information it carries. That one gives him a zest for all the others in eye rangeFame. Sometimes an advertiser thinks he has a pet scheme, and says: "I'm just going to try this out I may want your help later." He generally wants it sooner.-Battens Wedge. A man who changes his views is not necessarily inconsistent. If he were, the man in the rut would be the only consistent man.The Star Solicitor. The following letter, sent to The Fourth Estate by one of its readers, contains a suggestion regarding the anti-coupon order which will prepare advertisers who have been using the coupon for an influx of postals next spring: Sir: I am an admirer of Third Assistant Postmaster-General Madden in that I believe he has eradicated a number of abuses of the second-class mail privilege which ought to have been stopped long ago, but I now fear that, like many other reformers, he is aiming to go too far. In your issue of November 17 the statement is made that Mr. Madden has issued an order eliminating the coupon from advertising matter, said order to become effective March 4, 1907, ruling that such coupons are either writing paper furnished the reader for his convenience or advertisements to be detached from the publication, and therefore, in either case, subject to third-class rates. I wonder if Mr. Madden has paused to consider what order, if enforced, will do in the way of reducing the number of letters mailed under twocent postage? I venture to say that it will make a difference amounting to a vast sum per year in letter postage, as thousands of people clip these coupons and send them to advertisers at two cents per clip. this B. F. Bower. Many advertisers would gladly pay well for the services of one trained advertising man. When an advertising agent offers to put a carefully organized and experienced force at an advertiser's service for nothing, it looks so much like a gold brick that he often gets afraid.-Battens Wedge. The advice of Mr. G. P. Altenberg on Selling Machinery Abroad (Selling Magazine for November), is of value to manufacturers who are developing or intend to develop foreign trade. A few of his ideas on the catalogue that is to go abroad is all we have space for. Don't use the same line of talk in it that you do in the American book. The consumer over here is accustomed to standing for more exaggeration and more loose statements than foreigners will put up with. Cut out the meaningless generalities and tell how the machine is made, how it operates, what kind of work it will do, and how much of each size of work it will do per hour, how it is adjusted from one kind of work to an other, how long that takes, number of men required to operate the machine, speed, horsepower and floor space required, net weight, gross weight and cubic measurement when boxed for export. All these facts should be stated accurately. This is the hardest thing for an American to do. When a machine arrives, the foreign buyer is in the habit of checking up every statement in the catalogue. If the machine is represented to weigh 5,000 pounds and weighs only 4,300, the buyer is entitled to a rebate for the shortage, the same as if he had bought it by the pound, and could recover such rebate in any court of Europe. If the catalogues are intended for circulation on the Continent, all measurements should be given in the metric system, as in some countries the new generation doesn't even know what an inch is. The prices should always be stated in pounds, francs or marks, if catalogues are intended for circulation anywhere except in South America, where dollars will answer. From now on too much attention cannot be given to South America. Spanish is understood everywhere there, although it is not the official language of all the countries. A great development is now going on in South America. Factories are springing up everywhere. That continent is having a real industrial awakening, and for the next two or three years it is worth while for any firm seeking foreign trade to devote itself specially to South America. A recent remark by Dr. Van Dyke, the eminent educator, should be promptly applied by "In my every writer of advertising literature. opinion," he said, "the best way to learn to write good English is to read good English. Books of grammar and rhetoric are of comparatively little value." Big Orders Worth Getting You can get big orders just as easy as little ones, if you go about it rightly. The Big Farmers-the ones who farm on a big scale, and buy accordinglysubscribe for the Big Paper, The American Thresherman Some advertisers are misled by that name. They say, "We do not make Threshing Machines." No more do the majority of advertisers who use space in this big, ably-edited, aggressive publication, and benefit largely by so doing. If you want to make your advertising count, send for a sample copy and investigate. The American Thresherman, Madison, Wisconsin. 36,000 The Greatest Circulation ever attained by a Farm Weekly The Inland Farmer of Louisville, Ky. Leads in every feature that makes a medium valuable to an advertiser. Press work, paper stock, editorial and literary features, quality and quantity of circulation. Its circulation is in the South, right in the very heart of prosperity. Exceptional I want a live business man to take Chicago. Anybody who reads carefully will almost unconsciously acquire the habit of writing cor. rectly. Moreover, his work will impress his readers as being far more spontaneous than that of the writer who has the rules of grammar and rhetoric ever in mind and works strictly according to them.-Profitable Advertising. Told at Forty By An Employe Things look different at forty. I know, for I am writing this on my fortieth birthday. Life isn't any more serious than it ever was perhaps it is less So. Surely, it is nothing like as much of a problem. Surely, too, it is more comfortable. You see, I am an employe-one of the millions who get pay envelopes from somebody or somebody else every so often. I have always been an employe, and suppose I always will be. Somehow, there doesn't seem to be enough employing to do for all of us to have a chance at it. And, besides, most of us don't know enough to do employing. Yet nine-tenths of us feel that we are su perior to the men who pay us, and we criticise their methods and their actions. Not openly-more's the pity. I believe the average employer would be glad to hear decent criticisms, decently made. We sneak. We tell the other fellows in the place and our friends outside, how "slow" and "mean" and so on the boss is. And we are forever going to quit when we "get a good chance." 10 But we don't often quit-unless we get "fired" for a good chance rarely comes the sneak and the backbiter. But we don't get promoted or "raised," either--because our think-boxes are so filled with meanness that there isn't room in them for the honest thought that leads to better things. Or become paralyzed through fear that we are doing too much for the money we get; or atrophied through plain lack of use. our initiative has Often, too, we become obessed (suppose you look that word up) with a notion of our indispensableness. Then we're moored to a mud bank, and some stormy day we drift away to nowhere. of When I began to work I didn't see any these things quite this way-didn't see some of them this way at all. Of course, I wasn't forty then. on the way to it. So are But I was you, my brother-unless you have reached it or passed it. |