Finger finger, p.13
Finger, Finger!, page 13
The salesman now produced silently one of the covers of our Ultrapolitan. One which, for road purposes, was printed in at the top with a date several months ahead, and presenting the startling effect, as achieved on the outthrust newspaper held by the beautiful mummy, by Mr. Herman Blitzendorf of Bird Center, Arkansas, who was shortly, unbelievable as it sounded, going to enjoy that de luxe piece of advertising space. Like Mr. Blitzendorf, however, Mr. Whosis too was going to be permitted to buy that space, but once and once only. And thanks only to the most unique and odd circulation experiment ever done—at tremendous cost—in the publishing industry. For the Ultrapolitan Magazine, which was to be issued in 60 days as a standard national newsstand publication—here, in fact, was the cover of that first issue—was going to sell anybody that space—for as large or few copies as he desired—just to quicken the familiarity of the American public with the Ultrapolitan, and make the first issue a sell-out. Mr. Whosis, in fact, could obtain that space, and his ad or announcement completely printed therein, and have the magazine delivered—and 30 days in advance, too, of its regular publication!—directly onto the library tables of 100 or more customers or neighbors of his—for practically no more than the cost of multigraphing, folding, sealing, addressing, stamping and mailing 100 form letters. Which form letters, even if sent, would be worth quite nothing to Mr. Whosis—as Mr. Whosis probably knew—since everybody received such in large numbers, nobody read them, and everybody invariably tossed them in the nearest wastebasket. But here, it was emphasized to Mr. Whosis, was the form letter supreme—the form letter unique—the form letter that outshone every form letter ever written. For it rode not dully upon a sheet of paper, but upon the sparkling cover of a standard national magazine. A magazine carrying the greatest all-star battery of names ever put together in one issue. Mr. Whosis was invited to cast his eye over the staggering assemblage, columned all the way down the right side of the cover in bold black type, and each with a huge star in front of it. Look—here is a signed estimate from the Writers’ League of America, detailing the approximate cost of a set of stories by this particular assemblage of names. $30,000 they would cost. $30,000—to reassemble as assembled here in this first glittering number.
Mr. Whosis, however, was not expected to contribute one penny of that $30,000. That sum would all be figured in as a basic cost on the regular newsstand issue. Mr. Whosis was not even asked to buy any copies of the magazine, which were to retail, as he could see by the price mark on the wonderful cover done by the celebrated artist Harold DuKirk, at 35 cents, or 26 cents wholesale. Mr. Whosis was asked to pay only for the cost of mailing and addressing 100—or more—copies, and printing his ad in that waiting space. That trifling cost would be but $12.50 per hundred copies. Plus $1 for typesetting in case Mr. Whosis had some very special announcement appertaining to his business alone. Otherwise, he could have, at no typesetting cost whatsoever, the standard jeweler’s ad, prepared in advance. It fit any jewelry business. Or Mr. Whosis could have any of several standard announcements. The salesman now produced a small scrapbook and flung open its covers. Here were announcements and greetings, marked with numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. And in case Mr. Whosis did not have a list of his customers, nor the names and addresses of 100 persons living in his immediate vicinity, the salesman would obtain a printed voter’s list of that precinct from the election headquarters, and order 100 picked off thereof by his company secretary. Mr. Whosis had nothing to do whatever—but pay the mailing charges.
Should Mr. Whosis, the salesman was wont to say, be wise enough to seize advantage of this strange and costly publicity experiment, and get aboard for 100 copies—or 300 copies—or 500 copies—and the more Mr. Whosis took, the lower the cost would be, being but $57.75 for 500 Ultrapolitans, Mr. Whosis’ friends, neighbors—and those who scarcely ever had heard of Mr. Whosis or his business—would be thunderstruck when they saw Mr. Whosis’ name on the cover of a standard national magazine. How could he purchase a super-preferred position such as that—in a publication of such high standing? Either he had plenty of money—or big connections. They would speculate about the paradox to such extent that they certainly would never quite forget Mr. Whosis. Indeed, they would keep the magazine on their library tables to read at their leisure. Advance copies of a valuable magazine, worth 35 cents retail, are not tossed into wastebaskets. Particularly when they contain stories, never before published, from the pens of Penny Dale, Irvin Hume, etc., etc. And every time—so the salesman would say—that the recipients of the copies cunningly sent by Mr. Whosis sunk themselves into the work of these famous authors, they would see Mr. Whosis’ name and address and announcement staring forth unforgettably at them. And Mr. Whosis would attain, at practically no cost to him, their unremitting remembrance of him, as well as a most warm and cordial feeling towards him because of his having sent them free of charge an interesting and utilitarian 35-cent gift. They would bring their shoes to Mr. Whosis to be resoled, and—but let’s see—Mr. Whosis was a jeweler, wasn’t he? Well, they would bring their gold broaches to him for re-soldering of the clasp pins; their jewels to be reset; their watches to have new mainsprings inserted; they would buy their gifts from him next Christmas. Mr. Whosis would get back many, many times the trifling $12.50 it would cost him, through this ingenious stunt so expensive for the publishers, of landing his ad immutably and perpetually in their brains. He would reap inevitable sure returns, simply by taking advantage this once [and this is the only time you can do it, Mr. Whosis—remember that! ] of applying a national advertising medium to the tiny microcosmical territory about him, or to the scattered persons whose names appeared upon his books.
It was a real selling proposition. It sold itself, to a considerable extent. It appealed to the small tradesman’s vanity, to see his name part and parcel of a standard national magazine instead of in a community newspaper or on a dodger or mailbox card. But furthermore the proposition was sound. The theory back of it was good. The salesman received $3.50 from the $12.50 or so that we took in on each 100 Ultrapolitans we disposed of in this manner. All of the salesmen invariably complained, of course, that the proposition was the toughest thing they had ever encountered in their lives, that they had to talk like a dog for every dollar they got, sweat blood to put Ultrapolitan over, and that when they finally did, the client invariably had thirteen million foolish questions to ask about the magazine publishing industry which impeded their “get away” and prevented them from making as many calls as they otherwise could. All the usual variety of salesmen’s groans, in fact, which required a glowing-tongued optimist such as only the inventor of such a proposition would be, to assuage. And assuagement they got a-plenty, from Jack Kenwood. But no expense accounts. Advances on unearned commissions yes—plenty—for it was Jack Kenwood’s theory that salesmen were exactly like “white slaves”—that they worked twice as efficiently and twice as productively when in debt and trying to get out. But each, as I say, was on his own—so far as expenses went. He could talk up a dozen businesses in the same town, even in the same neighborhood, all in the same afternoon, if he did not get the usual salesmen’s fatigue. A cockroach exterminator was as likely a customer for 100 Ultrapolitans as was the hardware man, or tailor, next door to him, who had just signed up for 100. Or the druggist on his other side. Dentists, chiropractors, optometrists, practitioners of all sorts—except ethical doctors—were all possible customers.
Of course the magazine never got really issued, so far as the newsstands went. Its technical “publication,” in other words, which embodies the act of actually being put on general sale, got ever deferred, as the will-of-the-wisp keeps ever ahead of the hunter. We went on and on and on, ever selling it in the manner I have outlined.
Twice a month the accumulated orders were sent by Winsome One to our old crippled Jewish flat-press printer, each order carrying the number of Ultrapolitans required, the name and street address of the advertiser, the type of ad or announcement, and the list of clients. Old Sol ran off the requisite number of covers with the proper new month printed thereon, and on the proper spot left for it. And the client’s ad on the space provided by the mummy-girl’s newspaper. Young Abe stitched the copies, trimmed them, stuck them in the envelopes addressed by Sol’s daughter Rebecca, and mailed them out. Under 3rd class rates, of course. We did nothing in the office but keep track of salesmen’s accounts, close important sales contracts for larger quantities, take money or checks out of envelopes or charge it up to salesmen as advances, make up lists of orders, keep track of the postage on hand at Sol Rosenberg’s, or copies yet in the warehouse, and pay the monthly printer’s bills. Now and then Jack Kenwood hopped a train and with his magic tongue closed a big order somewhere, where he dared not trust the salesman.
We sold about 30,000 copies of Ultrapolitan per month. Kenwood made 4 cents per copy, above all manufacturing and selling costs: that amounted to about $1200 a month. From which $1200 I received each month the magnificent sum of $100—yes, I’d long been promised more, but never got it!—and when Winsome One’s sparse wages and the rent of Room 1122 was also paid, there was left for Jack Kenwood around $800 a month to spend on easy living.
And now comes the natural query. Wherein was Jack Kenwood, in this unique method he had for advertising and merchandising, a racketeer? Outside, that is, of pretending that his magazine was shortly going to be issued on all the newsstands of America? Wherein was he—
But O’Rourke just called up. He wants to know specifically how far I’ve gotten with my record. I told him facetiously that I had just finished explaining, for the benefit of his posterity, just what sort of work we three—Jack Kenwood, Winsome One, and I—did in Room 1122. He gave only a grunt, however, and said goodbye, I don’t know whether he’s satisfied with the progress of this record, or entirely out of humor with me as a writer.
For the Ultrapolitan office ought to be presented as much as any of its occupants. Didn’t it get to be the stage for one unusual act of the drama that swung itself about me directly after I accidentally got hold of that other fellow’s raincoat?
I’ll say!
CHAPTER XI
Lambkins in Lionskins
Well, just as O’Rourke rang up, I was asking you, Gentle Reader—for that’s what O’Rourke thinks I ought to call you—just wherein Jack Kenwood was a racketeer.
Well, it was in the matter of those confounded authors’ names!
Those 12 nationally famous figures, on the strength of which Kenwood’s Ultrapolitan proposition sold so freely. The thing which gave to the Ultrapolitan the stamp of high worth and utter legitimacy. For myself, I’m not going to apologize. I needed a job fearfully that time I answered Jack Kenwood’s ad—my thin shoes were soaking up the water off of Chicago’s sidewalks at every step—my stomach was shouting to high heaven for meat and potatoes, instead of rolls and coffee. And during the subsequent two years I was with him, almost every time my own conscience troubled me, and I commenced to toss about in my mind the idea of getting a new connection somewhere else, with no hocus-pocus attached to it, some highly satisfied customer of ours was sure to write in, enclose money, and want another few hundred Ultrapolitans shipped out with his announcement thereon. And Jack Kenwood, who seemed to have a faculty for reading my mind, would laugh at me and say: “There—there, David. Cease thy moral questings! For see—the Ultrapolitan does exactly what we say it will do—it meks-a da’ beezeness for-a da’ customer!—so f’evvens sake, quit worrying about those authors!”
With the result that I finally got like Jack Kenwood himself, and believed implicitly in Ultrapolitan as a true stimulus to American small business.
But about those authors.
Their names lay, as I think I said—but I can’t seem to find the manuscript page where I’m supposed to have said it—down the right side of the cover, in a great screaming column.
There was Hoot Carboy, the famous novelist and Western-story writer. And there was, moreover, in the magazine, a Western story that really was by Hoot Carboy. Kenwood had bought the right to run it, though solely in Ultrapolitan, for $15, from the Alkali and Cactus Fiction Group—at least their successors—whose various Western magazines purchased Hoot Carboy’s stories when he was an unknown beginner. The reason Kenwood bought this particular story, rather than a dozen other Hoot Carboy stories, was because he was successful in getting his hands on the so-called alternative ending. That is to say, he had once read a certain legend concerning Hoot Carboy, in a writer’s magazine, to the effect that the now-famous Western novelist used always to submit to the A & C F people two possible endings for each of his stories, and the A & C F editors, of course, would pick the obviously better one. This story of Carboy’s we had in Ultrapolitan was the one yarn for which Kenwood was successful in obtaining Carboy’s original alternative ending that had never been used—for the syndication sales-manager of the A & C F group obligingly managed to dig up for Kenwood a letter of Hoot Carboy from years back in which the novelist had stated and discussed his own alternative ending. Jack Kenwood, in his $15 purchase, had demanded the privilege of having a choice exactly as the A R C F group had had, but, curiously, took the erratic and weaker ending. Which no one had ever used before. Nor could use again. For he copyrighted his first copy of Ultrapolitan, and thereby vested within himself, if not the ownership of that particular story, at least the ownership of that particular ending! And, as he always said to me with a chuckle, since a story with a different ending is technically a different story, this story, therefore had never been published before, and could be legally so featured. And it seems that, according to some Supreme Court decision in an analogous case, he was, within the eye of the law, right.
There was also, I think I said, a story by Irvin Hume. Note that I said Irvin and not Irwin. I knew you wouldn’t notice that. Neither did the public, who had read and enjoyed the stories of the famous Irwin Hume. Nor did ever the Mr. Blitzendorfs notice it. Nor the Mr. Whosises. This Irvin Hume was a farm boy in the rural part of Minnesota where Jack Kenwood had come from. That similarity of names was what originally gave Kenwood the whole idea for his world-beater magazine. The story credited to our Irvin Hume was, so Kenwood told me confidentially, actually written by a drunken dissolute story-writer named Mingleberry Hepp, whom Jack Kenwood had gotten hold of in Chicago. It cost Kenwood $8. His friend, the Minnesota Irvin Hume, however, swore to an affidavit presenting that he was the author of the story, and that was that! Except that Jack Kenwood’s mother, who was a farm woman up in Minnesota, thereupon released a narrow half-foot strip of disputed land lying between two rocky, rutty pastures, to Amos Hume, Irvin Hume’s father. So that was that!
There was a story—actually but a storiette—by Okus Judd, the Grand Old Man of American fiction. Kenwood bought it from A. J. Goncourt, a purchaser years ago—and still owner—of the defunct Tennessee Traveler for which Okus Judd had written tons and tons of storiettes in his early days. It had been set up in galley form for the last issue of the Tennessee Traveler, which issue, however, never got published! Goncourt had once hawked the little galley proof around to the Brown Book, and the Hearstmopolitan, both of whom were then running Judd’s modern stories and paying huge prices for them. But they had scorned a story so ancient as to involve horses and buggies, and homes without telephones or light; and had called attention to its hopeless shortness, pointing out to Goncourt that magazine stories nowadays were not intended to be read—that they were merely verbal festoons which must be long enough to run clear over into the back of the magazine and completely around an entire Camel Cigarette ad, or gracefully enshroud a Kiss-proof Lipstick announcement. Kenwood, however, who had no problems concerning Camel Cigarette or Kissproof ads—which he had as much chance of obtaining as of Miss Nella Swale of the W.C.T.U. voting to put saloons in all churches—bought the tiny storiette from Goncourt for $10, promptly turned its buggies into Ford cars, made a small town tenor a crooner, installed radios, electricity and gas, and changed all the Tennessee lingo between a rustic farm lad and his gal, to modern drugstore cowboy talk. At the crucial dramatic point where a shadow fell at the feet of the two characters, and the chickens all ran scurrying away, Kenwood simply introduced an overhead Fokker 3-seater plane instead of Okus Judd’s hawk. He often told me, with a twinkle in his eye, how Okus Judd’s three brothers came in to see him shortly after he began publication, with blood in their own eyes; and how they belligerently maintained he had no right whatsoever to take an old, old story of their older brother’s and palm it off onto the trustful public as a new story; but Kenwood showed them the law on the subject, which stated that an editor had the right to make essential editorial changes on a story purchased—but not yet published, and pointed out to them that the law did not limit the time between one act and the other to even the 40 or so odd years that had elapsed. He was, he told them, with a shrug of his well-tailored shoulders, merely exercising the editorial prerogative. They could, if they wished, consult their own lawyer. They went grimly away together, saying they would do just that; but they never came back.
There was a story by O. O. O’Hennesy. (Owen Octavus O’Hennesy, so you think! ) O. O. O’Hennesy (Kenwood’s O’Hennesy), I might mention, was an old drunken bum, who lived in a 10-cent lodging house in Chicago’s famous Flop-House Row. Kenwood had badly wanted O’Hennesy in his table of authors, but of course couldn’t buy him under a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars. He hunted all the directories of all the cities, and all of the voting lists of all the lodging house districts of Chicago and the cities around and about Chicago. And finally, because of some special election of some sort, the Lord was good to Kenwood, for a voting list of Hinky Dink’s famous floater ward revealed an Oliver O. O’Hennesy. Mr. Oliver Ormsby O’Hennesy, as he proved to be, was old and quite drunk when Kenwood found him. In fact, after he sobered up and found exactly what Kenwood wanted of him, he demanded no less than a quart bottle of gin and two dollars. With the result that when he finally read off, to a combined stenographer and notary whom Kenwood employed for a total fee of $3, a short-story actually written by Mingleberry Hepp for $7, and tremulously signed over his rights in it, he had to be held up on both sides by two additional floaters, each of whom in turn had to have a dollar and a pint of gin. Thus O. O. O’Hennesy: price $14, plus a short quart and two short-pints of gin.
