which he has been so prominently identified for so long a time. Unquestionably many advertisers brush aside mail order papers without giving them due consideration, simply because it happens that their contents do not appeal to the literary taste of the advertiser. But we cannot help thinking that in Col. Hunter's investigations of the standard farm papers, he has failed to give due weight to the matter carried by them, appealing especially to the women on the farm. Page after page, department after department, is edited by women for women, and a surprisingly large percentage of the subscriptions to farm papers are in the name of the lady of the house. Moreover the good farmer's wife is by no means uninterested in the breeding of stock, the conduct of the dairy, the cultivation of fields-and in fact every operation on the farm. Attend any farmers' institute and see how large a proportion of the farmers are women. In truth every member of a farmer's household is a farmer, and there is no publication in the world which comes so near being a "family paper," in that it interests every member of the family, as does the average farm paper. in life, and that is not to exhibit the cleverness of the editor or salesmanager, or to display his taste in the choice of type and engravings. As a rule its primary intention is to convey a message from the house to salesmen and dealers-and the import of that message is how to sell more goods. Though it speak with the tongue of angels and be arrayed like Solomon in all his glory, and have no selling force, it is as naught, nothing, nil, nit. Whether that message can be best conveyed in an edition de luxe or by a very ordinary piece of printing, depends upon the message and the persons to whom it is addressed. Good printing pays-yes-always-but "good printing," fortunately does not always mean what the gentlemen interested in running up typographical and engraving bills, are pleased to term "artistic effect." No, sir. If you are addressing exclusively an audience of lady-like young gentlemen who sell corsets and ribbons, and pride themselves upon their daintiness-dress your message in the daintiest manner possible-tie it up in baby ribbon and scent it with sachet powder if you can bring yourself to do it; but if your message is designed for the edification of men who sell hog-troughs and manure spreaders, and who pride themselves upon being plain, blunt men, don't waste any time or any money on "pretty effects." The house organ should be thoroughly representative of the house and its product, and its dress, tone and appearance should be in harmony and in keeping with the house. That it be business-like from start to finish is of greater importance than that it meet the artistic approval of some "typographical expert" who does not happen to know who sells, buys or uses the house's product. A Mail Order BY GEORGE F. BURBA ND these, too, O my children, Mail Order Men, are heroes. They have abolished space. They have leveled caste. Brought the proudest marts of tradesmen, teeming with fruit of looms of every clime, ladened with gauzy fabrics from the Vale of Cashmere, or the coarser warp and woof of half-clad Indian women, to the hearthstones of the humblest. These, too, O my children, should be knighted. They have caught the lights and shadows, printed them upon their pages, sent them broadcast to the people. They have made men honest in their dealings. They have told the truth on paper. They have made an exchange easy. They have solved the problem of the country; carried cities to the farmer; laid down factories in the dooryard of the isolated. It is a rule of nature that no man can help himself without helping others, and that no man can help others without helping himself. These mail order people are no exception to the rule. Granted that their business was founded upon selfishness, just as is every other business. Granted that they builded for themselves, heeding not the shelter and comfort they might be giving unto others. Granted that they make a profit in their dealings. All of that does not lessen the fact that they have helped to make the whole world kin; that they have relieved half of the inconvenience of living in the country; that they have annihilated space and saved time and lessened cost. But, like all pioneers, they did not succeed without a struggle. Dishonest men, embarking in the business, set them back half a century. Prejudice, founded partly upon this dishonesty, fed by selfishness, fattened and grew strong and had to be overcome. Imperfections in the postal service and extortion in the express companies, had to be fought to death. The very art of printing and engraving had to be improved. And above all, men had to learn to tell the truth, for upon Truth and Truth only is the mail order business founded. He who does not tell the truth in his catalogues and advertisements can profit but for a day. He is sowing tares that must be harvested. He is planting discontent that will grow. He is fooling with a gun that kicks harder than it shoots and which will not stand cocked. He is balancing his toy balloon upon the point of a needle. Men say that business is prosy. It does not seem so to us. The mail order business, at least, reads like an epic from the sharpened quill of a master bard of old. It is a symphony of systems. To gather under one roof the product of the mills and shops and factories of the world-is not that poetical? To trade with people you have never seen, and never will; to have them confide in your printed word and trust their savings to your honor-is there anything prosy about that? To sit in an office and talk to ten thousand people, or a hundred thousand, scattered like blown thistle-down across five thousand miles of space-why has not some great poet given us a song that would do credit to the sentiment? * And these, too, O my children, are the mighty ones of commerce. They are building roads through wildernesses, letting light into the darker corners of existence. They are ridding life of its useless waste, planting beauty everywhere. They are teaching men and women to know the value of a dollar. They are curing discontent. They are preaching sermons on the ethics of the day, and finding a way through the jungle of modern industry to reach the open plains of a more modern business system-one that will enable a man to have what he wants and when he wants it. There is no civilization beyond that. I Mail Order Papers By Col. Wm. C. Hunter. T is interesting to note the things that actuate a man to spend money. The business man sees to it that he gets thirty-six inches for a yard, sixteen ounces for each pound, when he buys things that can be measured or weighed. Yet in the matter of advertising he often goes it blind and spends thousands of dollars without going into the matter of analyzing the commodity he buys. Within the last twenty years there has grown up a class of publications called mail order papers. These are weekly and monthly papers whose contents differ from the ordinary publications. These papers reach the great middle classes. They are not artistic in their make-up. They do not appeal to the man living in the city, and the wonder of it is to many advertisers, how these papers carry so much advertising, and how they have assumed such great importance in the advertising world. The rate per line for advertising in mail order papers aggregates more than the rate on any other class of publications, because the circulations of the mail order papers are greatly in excess of the circulations of any other class of publications. The rate per line per thousand circulation, however, is less than the rate per line per thousand in the fancy, or so-called "high-grade" papers. There is only one reason for these papers carrying so much advertising, and that is because they produce results. The method used in most cases by advertisers to determine results is the keyed advertisement. Probably threequarters of all the advertisements in the mail order publications call for response for circulars, catalogues or information. The advertisement is so arranged with its key number that the advertiser can readily determine how many replies he gets from each paper. Mail order advertisers do not have to be told about the excellence of the mail order papers as advertising mediums. The advertiser in the city is prone to take his own likes and dislikes as a measure for other people. He forgets that the people in the country towns have entirely different tastes, yet he places his advertising in the papers he himself reads, on the blind theory that the publicity he gets is profitable to him. The advertiser can not be too careful about analyzing people and papers. I have followed this mail order advertising business for over twenty years, and every day brings forth some new things; every week dispels some of the theories which have obtained in the past. An illustration in point-and it is a good one and well worth remembering— is in the case of a certain organ manufacturer: This manufacturer in the zenith of his prosperity made 16,000 organs in a single year. That was about eight years ago. Following that remarkable output, the sales steadily decreased until they went down to 8,000 organs per annum. The writer took up the matter with the manufacturer and suggested to him that the mail order papers would sell organs for him profitably. The manufacturer was prejudiced against the papers. He was totally dumbfounded at our statement concerning some of these papers having circulations upward of half a million each. He remarked that he never heard of the papers, and when we told him about the rates per line he was greatly astonished and could not conceive how such publications could obtain such high rates. However, he was induced to make a trial in the mail order papers, offering the organs direct to the consumer and agreeing to take monthly payments. The purchaser was required to fill out a blank, showing his occupation, his resi dence, length of time he had resided there, and also reference as to his character and standing. The plan worked out all right. The manufacturer is now selling 2,000 organs per month and he has demonstrated that the mail order papers are just suited to his proposition. The point however we wish to make is this: In these application blanks containing the information just referred to, the statistics showed that 70 per cent of the purchasers gave their occupation as farmers. The manufacturer figured that if 70 per cent of his sales were farmers, it would be good business to use agricultural papers, and he did so. He found, however, that it cost over three times as much to sell his organs through the farm papers as it did through the mail order papers. The average cost in the mail order papers was between six and seven dollars per organ. The average cost in the agricultural papers was about $20.00 per organ. This manufacturer did right in trying the farm papers. The evidence in the shape of statistics made from the application blanks showed that seven out of ten organs were sold to farmers, but when the results came in he could not understand why the farm papers going to the very people he sold most of his organs to, should cost three times as much as the mail order papers. The writer made some considerable investigation and has gathered data on the subject. This data is not hearsay, but very personal investigation. We found that practically every farm home in the United States has one, two, or even more farm papers. We found it equally true that these same homes have fully as many mail order papers. We found that most of the information in the shape of reading matter in the farm papers is of a character that appeals to the men folks. The reading matter tells about building pig-pens, about fertilizing the land, about planting, harvesting, and other things of direct and personal interest to the man on the farm. We found from our personal investigation that the women folks on these farms do not read the farm papers, excepting that part of them which refers to chicken raising or those departments about the home which appear in some of the farm papers. The bulk of the woman's reading matter in the farm home is mail order papers. The man will answer advertisements in the farm papers, but only those advertisements referring to articles he is interested in. The man on the farm does not make the suggestion to the wife that they buy an organ, nor does he suggest to his wife that they need a cook-stove. The only thing that interests him is the article which he can use on his farm or on his person. The women folks read the mail order papers. The matter of raising chickens and making flower gardens is, as a rule, directly the woman's vocation, and so the advertiser wishing to reach the women on the farm will find he gets his replies cheaper, and that his sales cost him less through the mail order mediums than through the farm papers. It is a truth, which is reasonable to understand, that if the advertiser wishes to reach all classes of people, he must use all classes of papers. It is foolish and presumptuous, for we of the cities, to refuse to advertise in the papers whose contents and whose general appearance do not appeal to us. We should be broad enough to know that there are many tastes and many kinds of people. We should study the fitness of things. We should have for our object the person we wish to sell, and then find out the papers this person reads. Then our advertisement should be put in these papers and thereby we are reaching the ones we are after. Most advertising however, is done the other way. The advertiser selects the papers which look good to him, the papers which he knows and the papers in which his father advertised. He |