Big Blue Newsletter - Marxists Internet Archive

BIG BLUE NEWSLETTER NO. Dedicated to the study of the publications edited by E. Haldeman-Julius

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The Hospital E. Haldeman-Julius

Mark Twain: Radical Emanuel Julius


Clement Wood Biography • The Appeal to Reason

HALDEMAN-JULIUS COLLECTORS CLUB CORVALLIS, OREGON

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elcome to the third issue of Big Blue Newsletter — I’m pretty happy with it and it was more “fun” than “work” to produce, which is always a good sign. While I have begun to get a few nibbles from HJCCers thinking about writing for publication, the articles still aren’t exactly rolling in. So remember: this is your space to share your collecting interests with like-minded others. Please use it! The organization is continuing to grow, slowly but surely. We’re headed for the 20 member mark, about twice as many paid up as we had last time. Twice as many more would be half enough, but we’re getting there! Hopefully we’ll be able to show a steady rate of growth and people will be sufficiently entertained by this publication to “reup” for another year when the odometer on the calendar flips. We’ll see. I know that there are many, many collectors of Haldeman-Julius stuff out there that are not members of HJCC and still other booksellers and libraries that would subscribe if they knew about us. Won’t you talk to a couple buddies or libraries about joining up today? I’d really like to have a couple good articles to print dealing with aspects of the large-format publications of the Haldeman-Julius empire: the Big Blue Books and the magazines. If anyone out there has any special knowledge to share — or just wants to muse in print about some things that they don’t know — please do get in touch. The Little Blue Books were only about 50% of “the deal” for Haldeman-Julius Publications and while they are the most prized from the standpoint of collectibility, it seems really.....wrong to ignore the other H-J fare. I’ve got a couple pretty good things from the pen of Emanuel Haldeman-Julius in this issue. I hope to continue in this way in the future: one piece by him dealing with his publishing empire, a second piece on some serious topic not relating to the collectibles in the least, casting light on the man behind the curtain. Hopefully this approach meets with your approval. Drop me a line if you love it or hate it. Finallly, apologies are due to Lee Kirk of The Prints and The Paper bookstore in Eugene, OR. I accidentally listed the wrong website URL in her ad in Big Blue Newsletter no. 2. Lee’s correct website address is www.kirksbooks.com. Please check it out the next time you’re surfing the web! Thanks and sorry again, Lee! Tim Davenport, Ediot [email protected]

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Cool Stuff...

David Williams (HJCC #F-1) read the article in Big Blue Newsletter no. 2 on the two versions of Little Blue Book no. 1366 and it rang a bell... A quick check confirmed that he had a specimen of LBB-1366B hand-signed in ink by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius himself: “Please hand to a friend / E. Haldeman-Julius.” Compare and contrast to the later version of the book (right) featuring a similar machine-printed message: “Please hand this to a / friend when you are / through with it. Thanks. / E. Haldeman-Julius.” It looks like somebody got writer’s cramp! Jake Gibbs (HJCC #F-3) passes along this interesting copy of the People’s Pocket Series edition of Diderot by Havelock Ellis (Little Blue Book no. 229A), first published in 1921. There’s just one intsy bintsy problem with this one, enlarged for your entertainment in the little box below. Hopefully Mr. HaldemanJulius didn’t lose too much sleep over the typesetting blunder — it goes without saying that these things haappen to the best of us!

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This coin keeper for Haldeman-Julius Weekly was recently picked up by Tim Davenport (HJCC #F-2) in an eBay auction. It’s a pretty uncommon piece of ephemera... The reverse of the card (left) is printed on white adhesive paper, which was attached to the very thick pasteboard obverse. The card was die-cut to allow the insertion of a quarter for safe mailing. The card can be dated with precision to 1923 and is interesting for its characterization of the H-J Weekly (a paper of “amusement and enlightenment”) — the new name given to the venerable socialist standard The Appeal to Reason from issue #1406 (Nov. 11, 1922).

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Clement Wood by Faye Landskov (HJCC #F-4) One of the many in a stable of writers for the Little Blue Book series was Clement Wood. Wood was born in Tuscaloosa, AL in 1888 and following the lead of his father, became a lawyer. He held several legal positions from 19121913, including assistant city attorney and chief presiding magistrate of the Central Recorder’s Court in Birmingham. Shortly thereafter, he took off for New York in search of adventure. He moved into Greenwich Village and earned a living successively as a waiter, staff to a vice commission and secretary to Upton Sinclair. Emanuel Julius first met Wood while working on the staff of the Socialist daily The New York Call in 1915. Wood was writing a humor column at the time and impressed Julius as “the superior southern boy who was out to make good in the big, wicked north.” In his later life as a publisher, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius hired Wood to write 57 of the Little Blue Books under various titles. According to Haldeman-Julius, Wood was a prolific writer and could churn out manuscripts nearly on demand. He ghostwrote novels at the pace of 80,000 words in 30 days, earning the sum of $2,500 per manuscript — more than fair money in the 1920s. He also wrote numerous books under his own name, beginning with a 1917 poetry collection, Glad of Earth. In his memoirs, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius tries to downplay the sales success of Wood’s Little Blue Books by claiming that a great number of the titles would have sold well under any pen Clement Wood was well-known as a name because they dealt with sex. Even writer and adaptor of negro-dialect poso, because of the pornography laws of etry used as lyrics by Jacques Wolfe the time, Haldeman-Julius Publications for this sheet music from 1928. could not openly advertise these books as he did his University in Print. If allowed to advertise the following, one would imagine he could have sold many more. Sex in Psychoanalysis sold 118,500 copies, Modern Sexual Morality sold 164,500, and The Art of Kissing sold 257,500 while titles like How to Talk and

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Debate sold 146,500 and The Best Negro Jokes sold 133,000. Not too shabby a showing overall. The breadth of Wood’s work spans from love, sex, and kissing to descriptions of life in Greenwich Village, nursery rhymes, and the history of religions — old testament to new. He was a man of wide interests and enough talent to flit from one topic to the next. Clement Wood was not only a newspaper columnist and a writer of Little Blue Books, but like his grandfather and an aunt who were the unofficial poet laureates of Alabama, he too penned poetry. To his credit are the lyrics to the “Shortenin’ Bread” song and “The Road to Mandalay.” Lists of his works can be found on the internet on many different sites. Wood died in 1950, having in his 62 years, been a lawyer, a schoolteacher, a schoolmaster, a novelist and a poet. He was married to Gloria Goddard who was another of the LBB writers and with whom he co-authored several of the pocket tomes. Interestingly, one of Clement Wood’s Little Blue Book manuscripts remains in print and is used by students of poetry today — The Complete Rhyming Dictionary.

The Little Blue Books of Clement Wood first published in 1923 0481. The Stone Age.

0982. 0983.

first published in 1924 0091-B. Manhood: The Facts of Life Presented to Men. 0098-B. How to Love. 0126-B. History of Rome. 0128-B. Julius Caesar: Who He Was and What He Accomplished 0147-B. Cromwell and His Times. 0514. Hints on Writing Poetry. 0626. Negro Songs: An Anthology. (editor) 0627. A Short History of the Jews. 0628. The Making of the Old Testament. 0712. Shelley and the Women He Loved. 0718. Great Women of Antiquity. 0830. Cross Word Puzzle Book for Children: No. 1. 0831. Cross Word Puzzle Book: No. 1.

first published in 1926 0056-B. A Dictionary of American Slang. (w/Gloria Goddard) 0986. How to Talk and Debate. 0987. The Art of Kissing. 0988. How to Win a Mate (The Art of Courtship). 1012. The Best Humorous Negro Stories. (editor) 1013. The Best Humorous Irish Stories. (editor) 1014. The Best American Jokes. (editor) 1015. A Book of Comic Dialect Poems. (editor) 1016. A Book of Nonsense Poems. (editor) 1018. A Book of Humorous Limericks. (editor) 1019. Bluebeard and His Eight Wives. 1053. A Guide to New York City’s Strange Sections. 1057. The Truth About New York’s Chinatown. 1058. The Truth About New York’s White Light Region. 1071. A Psycho-Analysis of Jesus. 1072. The Truth About William Jennings Bryan. 1106. Bohemian Life in N.Y.’s Greenwich Village. 1148. Sexual Crime and American Law.

first published in 1925 0172-B. The Evolution of Sex. 0708. An Introduction to Philology. 0709. Sociology for Beginners. 0710. Botany for Beginners. 0711-A. The Sociology of Lester Ward. 0713. Byron and the Women He Loved. 0714. Emerson: The Man and His Works. 0715. Auction Bridge for Beginners. 0716. Mother Goose: An Anthology. 0717. Modern Sexual Morality. 0719. Poetry of the Sudden States. (editor) 0800. Sex in Psychoanalysis. 0824. Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition. 0975. Cleopatra and Her Loves. 0976. Casanova and the Women He Loved. 0977. Pope Alexander VI and His Loves.

The Real Mary Baker Eddy. The Truth About Christian Science.

first published in 1927 1191. A Book of Broadway Wisecracks. (editor) 1210. A Book of Mathematical Oddities. first published in 1929 1336. Greenwich Villiage in the Jazz Era. 1337. The Breakdown of American Marriage. 1342. Typical Love-Problems Answered. 1343. Sexual Relations in the Southern States. 1344. How to Psycho-Analyze Your Neighbors. 1347. Why I Believe in Trial Marriage. 1370. Clement Wood and His Loves.

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The Appeal to Reason: Forerunner of Haldeman-Julius Publications by Tim Davenport (HJCC #F-2) I. Socialism in America

The American socialist movement as an organized political force dates to the years immediately following the American Civil War. The emergence of modern industry and a tidal wave of economic growth associated with rapid expansion of the nation’s railways quickly altered the American economy from one based in small-scale agriculture to one revolving around large-scale factory production. As mining, steel production, railway construction, and the manufacture of textiles expanded, so too did the pool of industrial workers needed for those enterprises to function. America was a land not only of open spaces, but of labor shortage as well, and it was new immigrants to the country from overpopulated and impoverished sections of Europe who filled the gap. Many of these laborers and factory hands came to the new world with few financial resources. These new arrivals found themselves forced to take whatever pittance was offered for long hours of toil in unpleasant factories and workshops. The problems of early American industrialism were obvious and onerous: a working day running to twelve hours or more, grueling employment of very young children in mines and factories without protection or supervision, dismal wage rates and no job security, overcrowded and poorly ventilated housing clustered in dismal urban slums with poor sanitation and rampant disease. Amidst this great suffering of the urban poor, the owners of the mines, mills, and railways began to amass enormous fortunes. Industries rocketed forward and strong firms swallowed their weaker competitors, forming mighty enterprises. These giant survivors aligned with one another as industrial trusts, fixing prices and forcing up profits. This festival of avarice would be interrupted every few years by a financial “panic” — banks would close, factories would be shuttered, unemployment would skyrocket, and the already miserable lot of the working poor would become still worse. The idea that there was a fundamental deficiency in the structure of the American economy sprouted in this fertile soil. A left-wing labor movement emerged, dedicated to exposing the glaring evils of the system and proposing solutions. Socialism — the notion of state ownership and public control of productive capital — came to be one of the most powerful political ideas by the last quarter of the 19th Century. The socialist reorganization of society was viewed in an almost millennial light, a simple and universal solution to poverty, inequity, and injustice of all sorts. This prescription for fundamental change spawned a socialist

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political movement and a closely associated socialist press. The most successful of these socialist periodicals was a newspaper published in Girard, Kansas, a small town in the eastern part of the state, called The Appeal to Reason. II. J.A. Wayland and His Newspapers

The story of The Appeal to Reason and how it arrived in Kansas is inseparably bound to the biography of its publisher, Julius Augustus Wayland. J.A. Wayland was born on April 26, 1854, the youngest of seven children of a midwestern grocer and his wife, part of a family with roots dating back to the days of the American Revolution. Just four months after J.A. was born a cholera epidemic swept his hometown of Versailles, Indiana, killing his father and two siblings. Hard times followed, and the Wayland family soon lost the grocery store that provided its financial support. Wayland’s mother, who never remarried, became the primary provider for the family, doing laundry and needlework to make ends meet. Little “Brookey,” as J.A. was called in his youth, was forced by circumstances to take on a series of small jobs to supplement the meager family income, ending his academic career after a mere two years of school. In 1869, the 15 year old Brookey was apprenticed to the printing trade, where he worked as a “rolling boy” on the weekly Versailles Gazette for $2 a week. Inside the publishing office J.A. Wayland Brookey saw a vision of his future, and he soon worked his way into the job of designing pages and setting type — a skill which remained an important aspect of his life for the rest of his days.1 After a few years in the printing business, Wayland and a friend managed to scrape together enough money to purchase the operation from the owner of the Versailles Index. Security on their promissory note provided by important Republican Party political figures in town, who sought a newspaper amenable to their political interests.2 The paper was promptly renamed the Ripley Index and was run with a careful eye to the bottom line, enabling the publication to survive the protracted Great Panic of 1873. It is unfortunate that no copies of this publication are known to exist today.3 By 1877 the 23 year old J.A. Wayland was debt free and had additionally managed to save a nest-egg of $1000. He married a local girl from Osgood,

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Indiana, Etta Bevan, and packed up and moved west. The Waylands landed in Harrisonville, Missouri, a town about 30 miles south of Kansas City, very near the Kansas border, selected because Mrs. Wayland had relatives living there. The young and ambitious J.A. Wayland was soon named local postmaster, a political appointee of the new Republican administration in Washington, DC. At the same time, Wayland went together with brothers-in-law Charley and Harry Bevan to purchase the Cass County Courier — a staunch Democratic Party organ in a largely Democratic town in the Democratic state of Missouri. The young Republican editor Wayland wasted no time in immediately — and opportunistically — reassuring his readers that the Courier would remain partisan, lending “steady, unremitting service to the principles of the Democratic Party.”4 This chameleon-like reversal proved short-lived. Later in 1878 local Republican leaders approached Wayland about starting a Republican paper and Wayland ended his association with the Democratic Courier in order to launch the competing Cass County News. It took this new Republican paper a year to gain 500 subscribers and two years to approach 1,000. After three years paddling against the stream in Missouri, Wayland gave up the battle. He resigned his postmastership, sold his newspaper operation, and returned home to the more friendly environs of Indiana — taking with him his first child, Jon Garfield Wayland, named after the Republican President-elect.5 Following another brief publishing interlude allowing him to bankroll several thousand dollars more dollars, the enterprising J.A. Wayland and his family again moved west, this time landing in Pueblo, Colorado, their home for the next decade. The Wayland family arrived in the Spring of 1882, just in time to capitalize on the town’s explosive growth, with the town growing from 3500 to 35,000 over the next ten years. Wayland worked as a job printer in this rapidly expanding mining community, gaining renown (and paying customers) as the populist proprietor of the “one-hoss print shop.”6 Despite this plebeian moniker for his printing business, J.A. Wayland — a man controlling a relatively healthy stack of chips in a town in which money was in short supply — was a major real estate speculator during this time, amassing a small fortune buying and selling property in booming downtown Pueblo. In spite of his personal prosperity, as the decade of the 1890s began, J.A. Wayland began to be radicalized by the world around him. Mine and railroad strikes for fairer wages and better working conditions took place frequently, and as a printer Wayland came into contact with strikers and was made aware of their seemingly reasonable demands.7 At the same time, Wayland’s Republican Party steadily moved to the right, advancing programs and policies of interest to the industrial owning class rather than the common folk who toiled in industry and agriculture. When he was formally introduced to the socialist idea via Laurence Gronlund’s seminal 1884 book, The Cooperative Commonwealth, Wayland’s thinking was profoundly changed. Wayland later recalled: “To be brief, [Gronlund] ‘landed’ me good and hard. I saw a new light and found what I never knew existed. I...went into the financial study so thoroughly that the

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result was, I closed up my real estate business and devoted my whole energies to the work of trying to get my neighbors to see the truths I had leaned.” 8

From 1891 Wayland began working with the local organization of People’s Party, contributing money to the campaign fund and printing the party’s newspaper, The Colorado Workman. He soon took over this publication as an unpaid editor, renamed it The Coming Crisis, and rapidly built its readership from a few hundred nonpaying subscribers to a paid list of 2,700.9 In February of 1893, Wayland liquidated his assets in Colorado and returned to Indiana for the third time. He landed in Greensburg, Decatur County, and was not long in launching yet another paper dedicated to propaganda on behalf of a socialist republic — the cooperative commonwealth. This new paper was known as The Coming Nation, the first issue rolling off the presses on April 29, 1893. The beginning was modest, a roll of just 98 subscribers, the names of whom were published in its first issue. The publication’s political orientation was clear: “If all labor was directed into proper channels, all the wealth now produced could be created in three hours a day, giving work to all and an equitable division of the products.... “The trusts and combines are dividing up the millions of wealth they have taken from the producers under the system of capitalism...” “The millionaire today lives in a palace, surrounded by menials, and the people who feed, clothe, and supply his wants live in tenements and cellars. Read up, see the truth, and you will be free....”10

Subscriptions to the new socialist paper began to roll in by the hundreds. The Coming Nation became one of the vital centers of the emerging political movement. Within six months the paper had 14,000 subscribers and nine months later that figure had rocketed to 60,000, making it the largest circulation socialist newspaper in America.11 During this period there was a great difference of opinion within the socialist movement whether the socialist system should be initiated through the electoral process — by an explicitly socialist political party organizing itself, building support among the industrial working class, agitating for its program and winning the votes needed to gain control of the state — or through the power of direct example. Those favoring the latter approach sought to establish model socialist communities, to prove through actual practice that common ownership, cooperative production, and egalitarian distribution was a superior system to capitalist competition. These socialist communities would then serve as models and beacons, it was believed, winning mass political support from the laboring classes and spurring on the transformation of society as a whole. J.A. Wayland firmly believed in the power of practical example. A thousand acres of low-cost land was purchased by Wayland 2 miles north of Tennessee City (50 miles west of Nashville) as a home base for a socialist enclave in the midst of capitalist America. Wayland wrote that “...the future perfect social state will be a growth from little beginnings. One practical success, widely advertised, showing that men can live and love in peace and plenty,

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Ruskin Colony, Tennessee

will do more toward bringing the Brotherhood of Man than a thousand speakers.”12

Income from The Coming Nation was to be placed in a common fund for use of the community, and all employees of the firm would draw their pay from it. Wayland wanted to rapidly expand this printing operation and to use its growth to attract other industrial establishments, run upon similar economic principles, to the colony. In July of 1894 Wayland once again pulled up stakes in Indiana and moved his Coming Nation to the new communal property in Tennessee — named the Ruskin Colony in honor of a radical writer revered by Wayland, John Ruskin. The Ruskin Colony was ironically established on an ostensibly capitalistic basis as a joint stock company, with all but six of the male members of the community contributing $500 to the capital fund and receiving in return one share of stock each for husband and wife. Most of the capital so generated was used to construct crude pine board houses and a building for Wayland’s presses, with the group later spending $5,000 more to obtain additional printing equipment. The colony’s printing operation, which in addition to The Coming Nation included The Ruskin Magazine Quarterly and the journals of several labor organizations, was the group’s chief source of financial support, as the rocky soil selected for the colony made agriculture extremely difficult. Some Ruskin colonists attempted to engage in handicraft production, albeit with small success.13 A school and a saw mill were established by the colony, which at its peak counted 125 people in its ranks.14 Just one year later, by the end of July 1895, J.A. Wayland was ready to leave, having grown weary over bitter fighting over the direction of the Ruskin Cooperative Association and its publications. Accompanied by his brother-in-law, Charlie Bevan, and a handful of followers from Ruskin, Wayland made his way to Kansas City, Missouri, where he immediately began to make plans for the publication of a new socialist newspaper. Although he initially thought of calling his new paper Wayland’s Weekly, the title The Appeal to Reason was settled upon, a name borrowed from Tom Paine, rationalist thinker and propaganda genius of the American Revolution. On August 31, 1895, with a press run of 50,000 — of which 4,700 were pre-purchased by a Philadelphia “angel” — The Appeal to Reason was born.15

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III. The Appeal to Reason

The Appeal to Reason was no overnight success. Indeed, for one of the first times in his career as a publisher the 41 year old J.A. Wayland found it difficult to make a living with a printing press. A large percentage of his Pueblo real estate fortune was poured into establishment and promotion of The Appeal, but its circulation stagnated at the 11,000 mark — a small fraction of The Coming Nation’s 60,000 subscription roll. In 1897, on the verge of halting publication, Wayland decided to take two final measures in an attempt to put his publication on a firm financial basis. First, Wayland began to use sensational methods to build subscriber rolls, making use of contests and hoopla to expand the paid mailing list; secondly he moved the paper’s offices from urban Kansas City to the little county seat of Girard, Kansas — a state which Laurence Gronlund had declared “ripe for socialism” on the basis of the committed and radical views of those People’s Party rank-andfilers who called the state home.16 A 1913 Appeal-published history recounted Wayland’s move of the paper to “staid and quiet” Girard: “Girard was then, as today, the dwelling place of many well-to-do, retired merchants, farmers, and the like. Its conservatism was intense. In Wayland it scented a potential peril. The advent of a ‘wild-eyed fanatic’ was thoroughly unwelcome.... Here...he and his family were again social pariahs. His children were hooted in school and on the street. He himself was shunned. Dark clouds of suspicion, scorn, and hate hung above the Waylands. At times, personal danger even threatened.”17

Regardless of his personal situation, Wayland was committed to making his latest publication a success. Subscription prices were slashed from 50 to 25¢ per year when four or more subscriptions were taken simultaneously and the ranks of Appeal subscribers began to grow exponentially. As the paper grew, so too did its importance to Girard as an employer. The economic clout of Wayland’s operation soon assuaged all fears. Within a year The Appeal’s circulation had grown to 36,000 and by the end of 1900 the paper’s paid readership topped 141,000.18 It was in 1900 that radical railroad union leader Eugene V. Debs was making his initial run for the presidency and Wayland seized the occasion to establish The Appeal to Reason as an unabashed partisan publication on behalf of Debs and the newly founded Social Democratic Party. A special Election Day issue on November 3, 1900, appeared in a press run of 927,000 — lauded by Wayland as a world record for any single newspaper edition up to that time.19 As the paper grew over the next fifteen years, during political campaigns and moments of political crisis, single issue press runs

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reached as high as 4.1 million copies.20 The turn of the century saw one other major change for The Appeal: Fred D. Warren came to Girard. Hired as a printer in 1900, Warren worked himself into the job of Managing Editor by 1902 before departing to edit The Coming Nation, which still remained in production. On Jan. 1, 1904, The Coming Nation and The Appeal to Reason merged, and Fred Warren returned to Girard to become Managing Editor of the combined publication. Warren played the leading role in the day-to-day direction of the newspaper for the next ten years. The circulation guru for The Appeal to Reason was a man named E.W. Dodge, a blacklisted telegraph operator. Dodge was oriented towards prizes and promotions designed to bolster circulation — contests which played no small part in building the publication’s readership.21 One of the greatest supporters of The Appeal to Reason and its mission was the emotional leader of the Socialist As would be the case with Emanuel Party of America, Eugene V. Debs. Debs, Haldeman-Julius a generation later, J.A. Wayland published a monthly magazine. one of the greatest orators of his generaWayland’s Monthly was actually a series tion, was an admirer of Robert Ingerof pamphlets produced in the guise of a soll. Like Ingersoll, he crisscrossed the “magazine” to take advantage of a country delivering hundreds of speeches loophole in postal regulations providing for a special 1¢ mailing rate for periodion themes of importance to him. Debs cals. Other socialist publishers of the day even went so far as to make Girard a also used this tactic as a means of home away from home, leaving his wife slashing their mailing costs in half. behind in Terre Haute and living in the town from the spring of 1907 through the fall campaign of 1908.22 Debs used his time in Girard to work on the editorial content of The Appeal and never missed an opportunity to promote the newspaper during the course of his travels. Indeed, Debs often travelled on behalf of The Appeal’s Lecture Bureau, the details of which were recounted by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius in his memoirs: “For years Debs lectured for The Appeal to Reason, for which he received only $100 a week and expenses. For that modest pay he made many speeches each week in widely scattered places... The Appeal to Reason offered Eugene V. Debs’ speeches to Socialist organizations at no charge, except, that the comrades had to buy so many Appeal subscription cards at 25¢ each. This meant that if a meeting was attended by 1,000 persons, each had to pay 25¢ for a subscription card, which entitled the purchaser to a year’s subscription to The Appeal to Reason... This meant that the lecture was free.

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This also meant that the circulation of The Appeal to Reason grew by several thousand each week that Debs was on the road, and he spent years at that work. It’s no wonder The Appeal built up so much circulation that it attracted the antagonism of the [conservatives].” 23

Among the publication’s greatest accomplishments was its 1905 decision to commission a young socialist named Upton Sinclair to write a novel dealing with the dark side of the Chicago meatpacking industry. The result of this project was The Jungle, a book which was first serialized in The Appeal before being published in hard covers.24 This novel soon and sensationally became one of the most influential books of the century, igniting the “muckraker” movement. The paper provided a forum for the writing of such prominent socialists as Debs, Jack London, Kate Richards O’Hare, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and Edward Bellamy, and introduced thousands to the writings of such seminal thinkers as Marx, Gronlund, Ruskin, and Paine. The paper sponsored speaking tours on behalf of the socialist movement and was in turn the beneficiary of vigorous promotion by its speakers as they crossed the country raising a ruckus and pushing subscriptions. An “Appeal Army” of 80,000 volunteers around the country distributed the paper by the bundle and generated new subscriptions by the thousand.25 IV. The Appeal’s Business Operation

During its peak of activity (1900-1914 or so), The Appeal to Reason employed approximately 100 people in its operations, producing a weekly paper with print runs averaging 500,000 to 750,000 — and occasional “special editions” with print runs counted in the millions. The paper was produced in a union shop structured around an individual working a 47 hour week. The day was divided into three 8 hour shifts, which produced the newspaper around the clock.26 Twenty electric machines were used in production of the paper, including the largest three-deck straight line Goss perfecting press in the country. This big press generally produced 25,000 copies of the paper an hour — folded and printed and including spot color, if desired.27 The Appeal to Reason was in large measure a mail-order operation. It stocked and sold hundreds of works from scores of different publishers, including fiction, children’s literature, sociology, farming, personal hygiene, humor, poetry, science, and religion — as well as the inevitable deep stack of books and pamphlets on socialism, economics, and related themes.28 Each morning the mail was received and postcards separated from letters, which were then divided by state-of-origin. The envelopes were then opened and money orders, checks, and cash removed. The monetary content of each letter was marked on the face of the letter in red ink and the letters placed in a letter file. The amount of funds received simultaneously entered on a tally sheet, which was used to cross-check and confirm the total amount received for that day. The letters were then turned over to “carders,” who wrote the name and address and total sent on a small card, as well as a list of the items ordered — subscriptions, books, or additional copies of the paper. Each card and letter were assigned a

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Postcard image of the fifth and final Girard, Kansas, home of The Appeal to Reason, a large custom constructed brick structure commonly known to socialists of the day as “The Temple of the Revolution.” The building was completed in 1908 (about the time this photograph was taken) and later served as the home of Haldeman-Julius Publications.

unique number in case future reference needed to be made to the original correspondence, which was filed by number. The “carders” then filled out mailing labels and kept track of all books and other items ordered. The orders were distributed to the various departments for picking and shipping. Book orders and extra papers generally shipped the day after funds were received, while subscriptions generally took from ten days to two weeks for fulfillment.29 Upstairs was a room where the address slips — small mailing labels — were produced. Stencils were produced for each subscriber by means of a special typewriter; each of these was filed by state, town, and street. Sometimes as many as 5,000 address changes were made in a single day. The address stencils so made were used by two label-making machines, which automatically printed each address on a long roll of yellow paper, which was clipped and pasted by hand in a separate process. These address labels were rapidly applied in the mailroom, which was a special postal substation staffed by a government postal clerk. Bundle after bundle of books and newspaper were thrown into a series of mailsacks hung on hooks, with an enormous stack of empty bags piled from the floor to the ceiling in the back of the room. Filled sacks were hauled away to the railroad station, a couple of blocks away, by a team of horses and driver employed full-time for the task. Passing trains were frequently stopped at Girard to help handle the extraordinary mail volume generated each week by the Appeal publishing operation.30 And the volume generated was truly tremendous — one special edition of the newspaper

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in 1913 had a press run of just over 4 million copies, which weighed over 120 tons and mailed out in over 4,000 mailsacks.31 Eugene V. Debs immortalized that which was valuable in The Appeal’s workplace culture with a small leaflet published in 1907: “The Appeal stops for nothing. It never sleeps and it is fed in its flight like a meteor.... There is joy in seeing The Appeal family, for such it is, at their task. They work with their heads, hands, and hearts. The most beautiful concord prevails in every department and the several departments are bound up in a system that seems perfection. There is no ‘boss’ in The Appeal. Not a harsh word is spoken. There is a smile on every face, kindness in every voice, joy in every heart. The work is done as all work should be done — with eagerness and enthusiasm. The more work the merrier the crowd, and if an emergency arises that requires special effort or extra exertion they settle down upon it like a swarm of bees and the decks are soon cleared for another attack.... It is truly mechanism of marvelous magnitude; a miracle of harmonious cooperation.”32

But all was not bliss. V. The Tragic Fate of J.A. Wayland

Over the course of time, J.A. Wayland became alienated from his expanding publishing empire. As Wayland stepped back, Fred D. Warren’s already large role with the paper expanded. In mid-1910 Warren signed a massive five year personal services contract with Wayland to run the Appeal for the princely sum of $25,000 per annum.33 Wayland began to again fill his days speculating in real estate — this time in Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Girard itself. In 1910 oil land in Preston, Oklahoma on which he had speculated began to produce heavily, making Wayland an even wealthier man. He bought downtown property in Amarillo, Texas, improved it, and began collecting high rents.34 Despite this financial success, Wayland’s personal life was anything but happy. In 1911 his second wife was killed in a freak automobile accident near their home. The following year he was also embroiled in what seems to have been a politically motivated “set up” by the US Justice Department, who contacted a former business partner and disgruntled female employee with a view to framing up a charge that he had seduced a young woman at the plant and taken her across state lines for an illicit sexual affair — in violation of the Mann Act. The indictment of Wayland on such a charge was rumored to be in the offing for shortly after the Presidential election of 1912.35 On the evening of November 10, 1912, just three days after the finish of Eugene V. Debs’ 4th — and most successful — campaign as the Socialist Party’s candidate for President of the United States, J.A. Wayland retired upstairs to his bedroom. There he opened a drawer and removed a loaded handgun. He carefully wrapped the revolver with a sheet to muffle the sound of the explosion. He drew a breath, placed the gun in his hand, raised it to his open mouth, and shot himself in the brain. Wayland never regained consciousness, dying shortly after midnight, November 11, 1912. Harried by the government, despondent over the failure of

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the Socialist movement to win the support of more than a small fraction of the laboring classes, tired of life, Wayland left an epitaph tucked into a book on his bedside table: “The struggle under the competitive system is not worth the effort; let it pass.”36 At the time of his ultimate surrender, Julius Wayland was 58 years old. His friend Eugene Debs was particularly shocked by the sudden termination of Wayland’s life, noting in a letter: “...As Mrs. Debs read the message to me I was so stunned that I could not believe my own senses, and I have not yet entirely recovered from it. Wayland is about the last man I would have expected to take the short cut into the unknown by his own hand. How his heart must have been wrung with agony and his soul torn with despair and desperation before he reached that fatal conclusion! But he had reached the farthest limit of his capacity to endure and while we all pity him with all our hearts not one of us may breathe the breath of blame upon him.”37

VI. The Appeal After Wayland

The Appeal to Reason did not die with its founder on a cold Kansas night in November 1912. Editor Fred D. Warren was left behind to pick up the pieces. About four days after Wayland’s suicide, he wrote a letter to Gene Debs: “I seem too dazed to think of much else aside from the terrible tragedy, but the problem of The Appeal and its future is one that will not wait and so this morning we assume our duties..., winding up in a week of events that have crowded so closely upon each other that I have scarce had time to eat and sleep. There will be no change in the conduct of The Appeal, other than the changes we can make to improve and strengthen the paper.”37

Warren invited Debs to go back on the road with an Appeal Subscription-Lecture tour. Debs Fred D. Warren proved unable to comply with this request as he had made a previous commitment to do a tour under other auspices. Debs did instruct his friend Warren that “if there is anything I can do for you and The Appeal in this hour of need and trouble I want you to command me.” Debs indicated that he would be able to send some articles for publication from his home in Terre Haute that would “help in some measure to make The Appeal strong and virile at this particular time when the battle is over [for the Presidency] and there is a general letting down for a breathing spell.”39 Warren continued to serve as editor of The Appeal until 1915, when he was succeeded as Managing Editor by veteran socialist journalist Louis Kopelin. Kopelin had known Emanuel Julius from their time together on the staff of the

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Socialist Party daily The New York Call and he lost no time in inviting his compatriot to Kansas to take over the task as the paper’s editorial writer and to assist with the writing of news stories. Julius showed up in Girard in October 1915, the start of a residency in that town that would last until the end of his life in 1951. Julius later characterized Kopelin as a “much abler editor” than that “student of feeble caliber,” Fred Warren, but a man far inferior to Warren in the task of circulation promotion. As a result, despite the production of a top-quality product, “the paper’s circulation went steadily down and down, until it threatened to break the publishers, the sons of J.A. Wayland, Jon and Walter.”40 External factors contributed to this decline. The eruption of war in Europe rocked the socialist movement to its foundations as in country after country “social patriots” foreswore their international commitments and rallied to their individual national flags. Many were discouraged in the United States, and the Socialist Party began to lose members. The fall of The Appeal from its lofty heights was a complex and protracted process, neatly summarized by American Studies professor John Graham, a historian of The Appeal: “The domestic effects of World War I were crucial to The Appeal’s decline. The Great War dominated socialist and national consciousness from its outset in 1914, three years before American capitalism and the Wilson administration officially entered the conflict and used it as a pretext to crush domestic radicalism. The world war, the shift to the right of public consciousness, division in the Socialist Party, the repression and delegitimization of American radicalism, the departure of old Appeal staffers, circulation losses, and the inability of Kopelin, Haldeman-Julius, and Walter Wayland to redirect The Appeal and mobilized its readers all pushed the paper into decline.”41

While Graham is perhaps overly harsh with Emanuel Haldeman-Julius’ politics when he characterized him “a political dilettante, a man who toyed with socialism and had no convictions that seriously challenged his own self-interest,”42 an account does need to be rendered of one stunning piece of opportunism during the last days of The Appeal to Reason — the “flip” of the paper on the issue of militarism and the European War. Prior to America’s intervention in the European War early in 1917, antimilitarism and international solidarity were regarded as axiomatic by the American left. Throughout 1916 the conservatives’ slogan of “Preparedness” was fought tooth and nail by all factions of the American socialist movement — ranging from gradualist reformers like John Spargo to died-in-the-wool “impossiblists” like Socialist Party of Ohio leader C.E. Ruthenberg. The European War was an abhorrent manifestation of capitalist imperialism, American socialists of all stripes believed, and those European socialists who had rallied to their country’s flag and participated in the mass slaughter of millions were flatly regarded as traitors to the socialist cause. Following his re-election in 1916 under the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” Woodrow Wilson clearly began moving the United States towards intervention in the European conflict on the side of the British and French. While formally proclaiming American neutrality, Wilson believed that American

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corporations should have the right to sell raw materials and military materiel to the belligerents. England’s superiority of surface vessels effectively blockaded Germany from receiving American shipping; only submarine warfare made it possible for the Germans to approach an equivalent status for shipping bound to British ports. As the sinking of ships by submarine entailed the loss of civilian life on torpedoed surface ships, American passion was stirred and ultimatums delivered to Germany by the Wilson regime. By March 1917 it was clear that American intervention in the Great European War was imminent. Not wanting to be caught off-guard, as were the Socialist Parties of Germany, France, and England, the Socialist Party of America’s National Executive Committee issued a call for an Emergency Convention of the party in St. Louis, to convene April 7. Nearly 200 delegates converged on the city in the immediate aftermath of Congress’ declaration of war between the United States and Germany. The Convention voted upon a resolution drawn up by New York leaders Morris Hillquit and Algernon Lee, both being regarded at the time as representatives of the party’s “Center” faction, and Charles E. Ruthenberg of Cleveland, prominent as a spokesman of the revolutionary socialist “Left.” The resolution branded Congress’ declaration of war to be “a crime against the people of the United States” and pledged its continued adherence to anti-militarism and international socialist solidarity. The resolution further called for “continuous, active, and public opposition” to military conscription and pledged to fight against restrictions upon freedom of speech and the right of workers to strike.43 The aggressive “St. Louis Resolution” was passed by the convention by a vote of 140 to 36, with the decision subsequently ratified by a mail vote of the SPA’s rank-and-file, 21,639 to 2,752.44 Amidst rampant patriotic hysteria, American socialists had voted to stay the course. This position did not sit well with the sundry intellectuals who comprised the Socialist Party’s “Right.” Many of the party’s biggest “names” resigned in protest — including such famous individuals as Upton Sinclair, W.J. Ghent, John Spargo, Charles Edward Russell, Robert Hunter, and W.E. Walling. Louis Kopelin and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius and their Appeal to Reason were part of this parade of defectors from the Socialist Party of America, spurred in this direction by the Wilson administration’s draconian use of postal regulations and imprisonments to silence radical opposition to its policies.

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Of the two Appeal principals, Editorialist Haldeman-Julius was the most malleable towards the new patriotic orientation. A Wilson voter in 1916, already in February 1917 he had announced that an American declaration of war would destroy an antimilitarist Appeal. Managing Editor Louis Kopelin fought longer: on April 28 he had editorialized that “The Appeal can not and will not lend its support” to the war. It was not until Wilson’s declaration of “humanitarian” war aims in December that he “flipped” to a social-patriotic position.45 Kopelin and Haldeman-Julius decided to relaunch their newspaper as The New Appeal — a weekly paper which would explicitly support the Wilson Administration and its war effort. The first issue under the new banner appeared on December 22, 1917, to catcalls of derision from the rank-and-file of the Socialist Party of America — an organization which despite the defection of the party “Right” and unceasing government repression actually gained membership in 1918.46 Kopelin and Haldeman-Julius may have been ideologically in harmony with most of the nation, but they were very much out of step with the thinking of the socialist movement. Circulation suffered. Three months after the change in the “line” of the newspaper, not surprisingly, the pair of editorial principals were informed by the Wayland brothers that the paper was theirs to buy.47 Kopelin was won over to the Wilsonian war effort to the extent that he enlisted in the Army, shipping out to Europe as a private. This gave a free hand to Haldeman-Julius to run The New Appeal and shape its editorial line. During the war years the paper trumpeted the Wilson administration’s nationalization of the railroads, telephone, and telegraphs, along with his proposal to seriously tax corporate profits as the coming of socialism, drawing the ire of the National Executive Secretary of the SPA, Adolph Germer, who charged that “the one time ‘Fighting Appeal’ has become the disguised vassal of the Wall Street Gang.”48 The armistice of November 11, 1918, gave The New Appeal a chance to again move leftward in hope of rewinning its old constituency. The federal government’s prosecution of Debs, Kate Richards O’Hare, and thousands of radical trade unionists and military objectors gave the publication an issue with which it could run. Wilson’s failure to enact the vaunted peace “without annexations or indemnities” similarly discredited the administration and enabled HaldemanJulius to move his newspaper perceptibly to the left. On March 1, 1919, the name The Appeal to Reason once again appeared on the masthead of the newspaper signaling an end to the flag-waving pro-war line of The New Appeal.49 Nevertheless, the restored publication failed to regain its momentum — its “Appeal Army” had dispersed and the mood of the country ever more hostile to the socialist movement amidst bombings, bomb scares, and a series of revolutions in several of the decimated nations of postwar Europe. Emanuel Haldeman-Julius came to regard The Appeal and its socialist tradition as a burden to be rid of, a fetter upon profitablity in publishing. The mass movement for American socialism was but a relic of the past. In November of 1922, the name of the paper was changed yet again, this time to The HaldemanJulius Weekly — and a glorious tradition had come to an end.50 •

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Footnotes 1. Elliott Shore, Talkin’ Socialism: J.A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 18901912. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1988), pp. 9-10. 2. During the last half of the 19th Century the anti-slavery Republican Party, with its base of support in the industrial north, was significantly more radical than the rural-and-southern Democratic Party. The two major parties “flipped” in ideological position around the turn of the century. 3. Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, pg. 12. 4. Cass County Courier, Jan. 4, 1878, pg. 16, cited in Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, pg. 15. 5. Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, pp. 17-18. 6. Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, pp. 19-20. 7. Wayland seems to have told the story of his radicalization in several variants, one of which includes a particular 1891 railroad strike and the print job he did on the strikers’ behalf. See Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, pp. 22-24. 8. J.A. Wayland, Leaves of My Life: A Story of Twenty Years of Socialist Agitation. (Girard, KS: The Appeal to Reason, 1912), pg. 27. Quoted in Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, pp. 23-24. 9. Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, pg. 26. 10. Quoted in Eugene V. Debs, 14th Anniversary of The Coming Nation at Greensburg, Decatur County, Indiana, April 1893. (Girard, KS: The Appeal to Reason, 1907), pg. 3. 11. John Graham, “Yours for the Revolution”: The Appeal to Reason, 1895-1922. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), pg. 3. 12. J.A. Wayland in The Coming Nation, Feb. 10, 1894, cited in Howard Quint, The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the American Movement. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1953), pg. 190. 13. Quint, The Forging of American Socialism, pp. 191-192. 14. George Allen England, The Story of the Appeal: “Unbeaten and Unbeatable”: Being the Epic of the Life and Work of the Greatest Newspaper in the World. (Girard, KS: The Appeal to Reason, [1913]), pg. 26. 15. Quint, The Forging of American Socialism, pg. 194. 16. Quint, The Forging of American Socialism, pg. 195. 17. England, The Story of the Appeal, pp. 26-27. 18. Quint, The Forging of American Socialism, pg. 196. 19. Quint, The Forging of American Socialism, pg. 197. 20. John Graham, “Yours for the Revolution,” pg. X. 21. Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, pp. 138-144 passim. 22. Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982), pg. 213. In popular mythology, Eugene Victor Debs was a railroad worker and union organizer who happened to run for President of the United States on five separate occasions (1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, 1920). While this job description is true for the earliest years of his career, in actuality the great majority of Debs’ working life was spent as a journalist and lecturer; he worked as primary Editor of the large monthly magazine of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen for well over a decade and wrote regularly for the socialist press during the years after his failed effort to organize the American Railway Union in 1894. Debs’ primary financial support in subsequent years came from lecturing and writing, not from union activities or the Socialist Party itself. Debs served as a de facto Assistant Editor of The Appeal to Reason during the 1907-1908 period and his writing was particularly prominent in the paper during those years. A November 19, 1912, letter to Fred D. Warren indicates that Debs remained a salaried employee on The Appeal payroll even at that late date. [Letters of Eugene V. Debs, v. 1, pg. 555] 23. E. Haldeman-Julius, My Second 25 Years: Instead of a Footnote: An Autobiography. (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1949), pg. 60. 24. Graham, “Yours for the Revolution,” pp. X-XI. 25. Graham, “Yours for the Revolution,” pg. XI. 26. Eugene V. Debs, An Inside View of The Appeal to Reason. ([Girard, KS]: [The Appeal to Reason], n.d. [1907]), pp. 1-2. 27. England, The Story of the Appeal, pg. 270.

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28. A 1915 edition of the Appeal Book Catalog runs to 144 closely-packed pages in cardstock covers. No more than 25% of the titles available related directly to socialism or economics, a quantity dwarfed by the amount of available poetry and fiction — generally apolitical. The list even included eleven titles under the heading “Anti-Socialism”! 29. A Trip Through the Appeal Office, reprinted in England, The Story of the Appeal, pg. 274. 30. England, The Story of the Appeal, pp. 275-276. 31. England, The Story of the Appeal, pp. 278. 32. Eugene V. Debs, An Inside View of The Appeal to Reason, pp. 2-3. 33. Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, pg. 202. 34. Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, pp. 202-203. 35. Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, pp. 216-217. 36. Henry Vincent, Wayland: The Editor with a Punch, An Appreciation. (Massilon, OH: Henry Vincent, 1912), pg. 5. Cited in Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, pp. 217-218. 37. Eugene V. Debs to Fred D. Warren, Nov. 19, 1912, in J. Robert Constantine (ed.), Letters of Eugene V. Debs [in 3 volumes]. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990), v. 1, pg. 555. 38. Fred D. Warren to Eugene V. Debs, Nov. 14, 1912, in Letters of Eugene V. Debs, v. 1, pp. 553-554. 39. Eugene V. Debs to Fred D. Warren, Nov. 19, 1912 in Letters of Eugene V. Debs, v. 1, pp. 555-556. 40. E. Haldeman-Julius, My Second 25 Years: Instead of a Footnote: An Autobiography. (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1949), pg. 60. 41. John Graham, “Yours for the Revolution,” pg. 15. 42. John Graham, “Yours for the Revolution,” pg. 15. 43. James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912-1925. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), pg. 126. 44. New York Times, July 8, 1917, cited in James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912-1925, pg. 127. 45. John Graham, “Yours for the Revolution,” pg. 250. 46. Average monthly dues collections for the Socialist Party of America rose from 80,379 in 1917 to 82,344 in 1918. [See: Alexander Trachtenberg and Benjamin Glassberg (eds.), The American Labor Year Book, 1921-22. (New York: Rand School of Social Science, n.d. [1921]), pg. 392]. 47. John Graham, “Yours for the Revolution,” pg. 250. 48. Andrew N. Cothran, The Little Blue Book Man and the Big American Parade: A Biography of Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. (Ph.D. dissertation: University of Maryland, 1966), pg. 90. Cited in John Graham, “Yours for the Revolution,” pp. 250-251. 49. John Graham, “Yours for the Revolution,” pg. 252. 50. John Graham, “Yours for the Revolution,” pg. 288.

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The Hospital: How Little Blue Books Are Given New Zest by New Titles by E. Haldeman-Julius An excerpt from The First Hundred Million [NY: Simon & Schuster, 1928].

When the Little Blue Books were approaching the thousand mark in number of different titles in print and on sale at the price of five cents per book there was a great deal of investigating and tabulating going on in Girard. Any number of influences were constantly being brought to bear on the selling totals of various books. A book that was a good seller in a list of 300 titles became a very poor one in a list of 800 titles. There must be reasons for such discrepancies. Figures were obtained. Inventories were scrutinized. And there grew up what I rather like to call The Hospital, an editorial sanctum sanctorum into which were sent those books which were not selling their quota. In any scheme of mass production and a low-priced product a certain average distribution must be maintained. In the Little Blue Books it developed that any single book must be sold in a minimum quantity of at least 10,000 copies every year. This was not exactly a fixed figure, but was flexible to the extent that a book might sell 8,000 or 7,000 copies annually and still be kept in the list. But it meant chiefly that any book running consistently below 10,000 copies annually was sent to The Hospital for consideration of the selling points shown in its title-and-author listing in the catalogue and advertisements. When The Hospital began it was overcrowded with book-patients. The list of Little Blue Books had grown with such leaps and bounds in the five years it had then been in existence that a number of titles had been passed along the way and left dying in a ditch behind us. That is, it was not noticed until very suddenly that some of the earlier books were losing their place — they were not selling, or, when they came to be investigated, it was found that they had never sold so many copies as they ought. The first thorough tabulation of figures sent a hundred or so books to The Hospital for a complete examination and going over. A good title is a work of genius. I have no hesitancy in saying that, for it is genius whether it is the inspiration of a lucky moment or the painful elaboration of a faint idea through an hour of deep thought. I have always made the final decision as to the title of any Little Blue Book, but I have never confined the search for a new title entirely to my own efforts. An editor must have recourse to more than one

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method for achieving any desired result. Often a Little Blue Book sent to The Hospital would be read by two or three editorial assistants, and they would all comment on it, making suggestions. Out of that a new title would be born and given a trial. Alice, my ten-year-old daughter, has even played her small but significant part in the birth of new titles. Children are voracious readers, and they usually read with such directness of viewpoint that they have something definite to say about what they read. They approach books with freshness, and a book must be vital and alive to hold their interest. As any writer for children knows, children make the most critical audience in the world. For example, I gave Alice a copy of Captain Marryat’s Privateersman, which had not been going well. Perhaps people did not know what a privateersman might be. Alice did not know. Yet it was a good story, and it is still in the list because Alice said, after reading it: “It’s about a seaman and battles.” It was rechristened The Battles of a Seaman, with a marked improvement. In 1925 it sold 7,500; in 1926, 8,000 — and in 1927, with the change of title, it sold 10,000 copies. One of the first books to go into The Hospital was Théophile Gautier’s Fleece of Gold. This amazed me; in fact, it nearly floored me. There were two good reasons why this book should be a top-notch seller. First, the author was a Frenchman — American readers have a “weakness” for tales by French authors. Second, it was an excellent story, full of love interest and everything that should place it high among the stories of love and sex. But a moment’s consideration of the book shows at once what is wrong. What could “fleece of gold” mean to anyone who had never heard of Gautier or his story before? Little, if anything. It suggests Greek mythology instead of Modern France. Gautier’s title is picturesque, even poetic, but it lacks informative value. It tells nothing whatever. A happy thought brought this title to mind: The Quest for a Blonde Mistress, exactly the sort of story it is. The record is, in 1925, under the old title, only 6,000 — in 1926, under its new banner, this jumped almost unbelievably to 50,000! Some skeptics will raise the objection — I know, for I have already considered it — that such retitling cheapens a book. In refutation I offer an example or two from classical literature where authors showed more precision in titling their own works. Is there any great difference between the tone of The Quest for a Blonde Mistress and The Taming of the Shrew? The latter is by William Shakespeare, unaltered. And how about The Merry Wives of Windsor, an accepted Shakespearean title? Such an objection vanishes into thin air when parallel examples are cited. The reason that a new title such as I gave Gautier’s story seems to cheapen a book is that it is, at first, rather startling. Again, consider Balzac’s A Study of a Woman, or his Splendors and Míseries of a Courtesan. These titles could not be more apt. Even Gautier himself was particu-

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lar and to the point in his titling One of Cleopatra’s Nights, a title that cannot be improved upon. Then there was Molière’s play, Les Préciuses Ridicules. For a long time this was in the Little Blue Books under the French title, with the name of Molière to recommend the book. The French title was bad for another reason — it intimated to some readers that the whole play was in French. By a happy chance the best possible English title was hit upon for this book: Ridiculous Women. This conveys the idea exactly: comedy and irony are both suggested. I do not think this play has ever been given a better English title. Something like The Highbrow Ladies is usually used, but I don’t like that. It is rather too pompous; it sounds “genteel.” But Ridiculous Women connotes the whole spirit of the play — and it sells the book. Under the French title, as the list grew in variety, this book dropped to almost zero. The new title raised it to better than 10,000 annually. Another Molière play, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, was also a problem. A lame attempt was made to make use of The Nobody Who Apes Nobility, but this was awkward and wholly inadequate. There is not real idea in this title that can be grasped at a glance. You can figure it out, to be sure, but what reader is going to regard titles as riddles? The right title for this book, in modern American slang, is The Show-Off; and that is what it is now being called. In yearly sales it has jumped from slightly above zero to almost 10,000. At one time in the history of the Little Blue Books, as I have said, little attention was paid to titles. The enterprise was growing so fast that the most important thing was to get new books into print — the public demanded books, and before its choice was spread over so wide a range of subjects — before it had a real choice to make, in other words — the title did not matter so much as long as the book was a good one. But as soon as choice became paramount in making out an order for Little Blue Books, the title leaped into first-place significance. Now the title is considered from every possible angle before a Little Blue Book is put on sale. In those early days two volumes of the collected essays of Llewelyn Powys were put into the series. I was glad to do this — the essays are eminently readable and I was sure Little Blue Book readers would enjoy them. And I let Mr. Powys give his own titles to the books. So the books appeared as Honey and Gall, and Cupbearers of Wine and Hellebore. This was very pretty, and appealed to a few readers — but only a few, in fact, almost none. Something had to be done to save these essays from an untimely death. They are now called, with fair success, Studies in Mystic Materialism and A Book of Intellectual Rowdies. The first sold 15,000 in 1926; the second 11,000. For those who may like them, the older and less informative titles are still on the covers of the books.

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A similar poetic mistake was made when several volumes of Jack London’s stories were put into the series. One book, because I fancied the phrase from one of the stories, was called Tales of the White Silence. This seemed to me particularly expressive. I really thought the book would go. Of course, the name of Jack London carried the book satisfactorily, but still it seemed to me that it should do better. At last I was forced to give up my fanciful preference for “white silence,” and now I think that the newer title is really the better. It is: Tales of the Big Snows. The difference in expressiveness is instantly apparent. It is really amazing what the change of a word may do. The mere insertion of a word often works wonders with a book. Take the account of that European mystery of intrigue and political romance, which Theodore M.R. von Keler did for me under the title of The Mystery of the Iron Mask. This title was fair. It certainly tells what the book is about. But there is something aloof about it. It may, says the reader to himself, be another one of those poetic titles. It may fool me, he thinks, and so he bewares. But I changed it to The Mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask, and now there can be no question for the record is 30,000 against 11,000 copies per year. Two other “slight” additions come to mind. Victor Hugo’s drama, The King Enjoys Himself (Rigoletto; translated by Maurice Samuel), and Zorilla’s, the Spanish Shakespeare’s, None Beneath the King (translated by Isaac Goldberg) were both rather sick — 8,000 for the first and only 6,000 for the second. In 1927, lo and behold, the miraculous cure of title-changing brought 34,000 sales for None Beneath the King Shall Enjoy This Woman, and 38,000 for The Lustful King Enjoys Himself ! Snatched from the grave! Then there was Whistler’s lecture, fairly well known under the title Ten O’Clock. But readers of Little Blue Books are numbered by at least ten thousand for each title yearly. Due to the concentrated interest shown in self-education and self-improvement this helpful lecture on art should be read widely — following this reasoning, the proper explanatory titled evolved into What Art Should Mean to You. Readers are more interested in finding out what art should mean to them than in discovering what secret meaning may lie behind such a phrase as “ten o’clock.” In 1925 the old title sold less than 2,000; in 1927, the sales, stimulated by The Hospital’s service, mounted to 9,000. Francis Bacon’s Apothegms, under that name in the Little Blue Books, was one of my cripples. Here is a great book by a great philosopher. And yet, so listed, it was practically at a standstill — less than 2,000 copies yearly when I came to investigate it. What is wrong with it? The fault lies on its face — the average person, even many a person above the average, does not understand what the word “apothegm” means. I know I had to look it up in the dictionary the first time I came upon it. Many

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people do not like to go to the dictionary: they prefer to pick up their new words in conversation, where the relation of one word to another will indicate something of its meaning. This is not commendable, perhaps, but it happens to be true. Not one person in a thousand knows what “apothegm” means. People are not afraid of meaty reading, of a substantial reading diet. I can prove that. But they fight shy of the utterly strange. A book by the same Francis Bacon entitled The New Atlantis was doing a little better than 7,000 yearly — not satisfactory, but on the brink of success, so to speak. There is hope when a book gets some distribution, even if it is less than one has hoped. But when it practically stands still the burden is unnecessarily heavy. This collection of apothegms is a splendid book, in which a great philosopher gives several hundred brief sentences, many of them sparkling epigrams, about this thing we call life. The sentences are interesting, because they tell us about what interests us most — life. What is an apothegm, then? Simply a terse truth. Look it up for yourself. So, taking the problem in hand, I remedied the situation by retitling the book: Terse Truths About the Riddle of Life. The following year (1926) this book climbed to a sales total of a few copies over 9,000 — which is worth selling, I am happy to say. Robert Louis Stevenson belongs, to a large extent, with those accepted literary giants — in the sense of world fame, for I do not propose to be critical here — who should not be altered. Certainly I have proved by the success of the pocket edition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that this is a title that cannot be altered with impunity or benefit. Even the movies kept this title, which is a good sign of its widespread effectiveness. But with Will o’ the Mark and Markheim (both in one volume) a question arises. Are these two stories sufficiently familiar to make them desirable books to read? The sales record of this book indicated that they were not. The latter story is a psychological study of a murderer and his crime — yet the man’s name alone does not convey this at all. It might be any sort of story from the title as Stevenson had it. I called it Markheim’s Murder, which gives it a definite classification, and from practically a cipher the book leaped to 7,000 copies annually. It is still shaky, as you see! Perhaps something more drastic should be done to it. Rudyard Kipling has several good titles of his own that I should not venture to touch. What could be better, for example, than Without Benefit of Clergy? Certain of his poems, too, are so famous that they are clamored for as they are — The Vampire, Mandalay, and Gunga Din. Some of the stories, as The Man Who Would Be King, go very well also. But there is a lure in these stories that is not expressed in the title, and that I have no way of suggesting except by the title. By this I mean the fascinating adventures of the British soldiery in India — those unforgettable episodes of happy-

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go-lucky army life. So I am experimenting with some titles like Tales of British Soldiers in India and Stories of Army Life. It seemed to me that there could be no reason why Oscar Wilde’s Pen, Pencil and Poison should not sell. That title appeals to me. But it apparently does not appeal to the public at large, as the records of this book showed. And anyone can see, now that the change has been made, that The Story of a Notorious Criminal is much more likely to aid the wide distribution of the book. It is another good example of the change from the poetic to the practical, for from 5,000 annually the book rose in 1926 to 15,800 copies! A number of definite tendencies in titling have come up in this experimenting with what banner a book shall go forth under. All of this is, of course, a revealing commentary on the reading tastes of the American public. There is, for example, the yearning for the truth about things. Americans want to know the truth, even if it hurts — and if you tell them that you are giving them the truth they will at least believe you long enough to read what you offer them under that name. Take, for example, Dr. Arthur J. Cramp’s “Patent Medicine” and the Public Health. This is a purely academic, professional-thesis sort of title. It indicates what the book is about, but it suggests nothing of controversy, nothing that anyone ought to know. Yet The Truth About “Patent Medicine” tells the reader that there is some sort of exposure here, something which he may owe it to himself to find out about. This book sold scarcely 3,000 copies in 1925; in 1926, being the “Truth,” it did a trifle better than 10,000 copies. That is why The Truth About New York’s Chinatown is a better title than simply New York’s Chinatown. That is why, too, such a book as The Truth About Los Angeles is read throughout the United States. There is another magical word in titles. It is Life. The American reading public of today is intensely interested in real life. Witness the success of the confession type of magazine, which tells in loud language that it is offering the truth about real lives. Witness the dominance of love and sex books over all others in the sales record of Little Blue Books as a whole; sex is undoubtedly the most intimately connected with everyday living of any subject you could name. The interest in life is clearly evidenced by the repeated selections of books which have that word in the title. There was Charles J. Finger’s book entitled Addison and His Times. This title is too scholastic: it sounds too much like a thesis written before graduation from a university. But London Life in Addison’s Time indicates that the book may be at least interesting. Before the change I moved this book, as a matter of fact, only in complete sets; now it squeezes by with 7,000 per year. Dan Hennessy’s On the Bum never was a bad seller. As a matter of fact, it is one of the steadiest selling books in the entire list. But the addition of Sketches of Tramp

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Life to the more figurative title helped it even more. There is even one of my books, The Color of Life. My own books in the Little Blue Book series are on the whole poor sellers, as I have more than once candidly admitted. But this book, since it has so good a title — and its contents, I venture to hope, live up to it — is a very fair seller as compared with the others. And such combinations, of course, as Love Tales of Italian Life, French Tales of Passion and Cruelty, and Boccaccio’s Tales of Love and Life cannot be beaten. The ever-present tendency of the public toward self-improvement has naturally influenced many a title in the series. I have already mentioned one or two examples. People want to improve their conversation, their vocabulary, or they simply want general principles of self-improvement, as in John Cowper Powys’ lecture, The Secret of Self-Development. Arthur Schopenhauer is a forbidding name to the uninitiated. His Art of Controversy never did go very well. But now it is called How to Argue Logically and has earned its permanent place in the list. This is another one of those “naughts” which leaped suddenly, through the magic of words, to 30,000 copies per year. The “how to” beginning for a title is still another magical catchphrase. Pianoplaying is all right, but notice how much more dynamic and compelling How to Play the Piano is, or even, if there is space to print it, How to Teach Yourself to Play the Piano. The book on conversation has an interesting anecdote to be told about it — at first it was simply Thomas De Quincey’s Essay on Conversation. When this book came into The Hospital past experience showed immediately that it ought to be called How to Improve Your Conversation. But De Quincey’s essay is a bit too studied and scholarly to be offered to an unsuspecting public under that title, at least by itself. It is still in the book, but half of the book is now taken up with Lloyd E. Smith’s portion, written especially to fit the title How to Improve Your Conversation. That is one of the inside stories of how one popular Little Blue Book was born! Arthur Schopenhauer’s Art of Controversy, mentioned in the preceding paragraph, is more practical and did not need such a preamble. An entirely separate field of title experimentation was opened in the general classification of biography. “Biography” seeming to be less colorful, I have been trying out “Personalities” as a catalog division. My experience has been that names alone, even if world-famous, are not sufficient to sell Little Blue Books. It appears that the book-buyer is one of the laziest persons on earth when he examines a catalog of books. He may know perfectly well that Leo Tolstoy is a Russian story-writer, but he refuses to identify that name for himself. I know that this is so because I used to offer Garnett’s Life of Tolstoy, and I am able to compare it with the records of the book under its present title: Tolstoy, Russian Novelist. It is 2,500 against the present

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average of 6,500 copies per year. The book is not yet secure — but the change in sales is nevertheless significant. The general rule in titling biographies has been to name the person and identify him. Fanciful titles will not do at all for five-cent accounts of the life and works of various prominent people. The prospective reader must be reminded, in so many words, of precisely whom the book is about; and, if possible, the title must also tell the book’s particular bias or motivating thesis. Thus, Joseph McCabe’s biography of Ingersoll is called Robert G. Ingersoll, Benevolent Agnostic. You can see at a glance that this is ever so much more effective than simply Life of Ingersoll. There are cases where the simpler and more obvious title will sell a biography. This is usually true of only what may be called “standard” biographies, however. I refer to Life of Jesus, by Ernest Renan; Life of Lincoln; Life of Napoleon, etc. Often the biographical titles require a great deal of experimenting. When the Little Blue Books were young I put in as No. 10 in the series that delightful essay by Francis Thompson on Percy Bysshe Shelley. That jewel of literature always seemed worthy of perpetuation to me, and I wanted to have it read by thousands of people. I cannot say that my hope for it has been fulfilled, although the book is still in print and available. But I am trying it under the title of Shelley, Idealistic Dreamer. If I called him a poet I hardly think that would help: few people are compellingly interested in the life of a poet. But Shelley was more than a poet, and if I can only get people to buy Thompson’s essay I’m confident each one will feel that it is five cents well spent. At any rate, the new title does four times as well as the old — 8,000 against 2,000 copies annually. A classic example of failure to comprehend the man a book is about is the Life of Barnum. When Charles J. Finger wrote this book for me he offered the forceful title: Barnum, the Man Who Lured the Herd. Unfortunately, viewing the matter in the light of later experience, I am afraid the public thought that Barnum was either an eccentric cowpuncher or a rustler of cattle! Consequently, this book was sent to The Hospital, and it came forth with the brand-new appellation of P.T. Barnum and His Circus. This is not only much better, but it tells exactly what the book is about. It jumped the book from 4,000 copies in 1925, to 8,000 in 1926. Martin Luther is another case in point. A life of Luther without any other recommendation did not appeal to readers anywhere near to the same extent as does Martin Luther and Protestantism. On the other hand, it might seem that a life of Benjamin Franklin could succeed very well with such a name alone. But of late years it has become desirable to accentuate the human qualities of our great men, and that is probably the reason that I have found Benjamin Franklin, Printer and Statesman slightly less popular than Franklin, Lover of Life.

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I would have gambled a great deal on Clement Wood’s biography of Casanova, especially since it was deliberately entitled Casanova and His Loves. The universal popularity of the “sex books,” so called, would seem to indicate that this book on Casanova should be automatically a best seller. It did not work out that way. The diagnosis of the failure was that people did not know the name Casanova, and so they did not care a nickel’s worth about whom he loved or did not love. There was a mild revolution in the sales record of this book when it was advertised as Casanova, History’s Greatest Lover! Witness the figures — 8,000 before the change: a yearly sale of 22,000 after it! A similar example is Ralph Oppenheim’s life of George Sand; it is now called, with a gain of 6,000 copies a year, The Love-Life of a Frenchwoman. Which proves, if anything, that the public would rather buy a book about an unknown Frenchwoman, when reminded that she is French, than one about someone whose name suggests neither nationality nor familiarity. Scientific titles have also needed elucidation and popularization from time to time. Science has the reputation, with the general public, of being very dry reading. A few magazines, featuring the strange and bizarre, particularly in mechanical inventions, have managed to make science commercially popular as reading matter. But among books there is still great progress to be made. The “outlines” did a great deal to remove the stigma, and now the “stories” of this and that phase of knowledge are helping us all to progress in the humanizing of scientific knowledge. (I might say, in passing, that the titles of the individual numbers of my Key to Culture series have been carefully chosen with this point in mind.) There has always been a market for books which make things plain, such as Evolution Made Plain. Then I tried “introductions” to this and that, and scientific subjects “for beginners,” but neither of these variations of title has been quite so successful as “the facts you should know” caption. An important secret of successful titling is to be imperative, to insist in the very name of the book that the reader should have it! Now Life Among the Ants was much improved in its distribution by extending it thus: Facts You Should Know About Life Among the Ants, or sometimes, when less space is available, Fascinating Facts About Ant Life. I took a tip from the “Fact Compendiums” of some years ago, and from the “Handy Books of Facts” which are still commercially profitable reference books. The public of today wants facts, and it likes to be told that it is getting facts. But there is no general rule applicable to all cases. There is always room for experimentation, and I have changed a title of one book as many as half a dozen times. What works in one place is just as likely to be a failure in connection with some other book. For example, Facts About the Moon does not have nearly the selling value of Is the Moon a Dead World? The latter has romance in it, adventurous sugges-

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tion in it, and all the force of the continual controversy about whether or not there is life on other globes besides the earth. The same characteristics may be discerned in this title: Solving the Mystery of the Comets. Maynard Shipley, the author of the lastnamed two books, deserves a great deal of credit for his work as a popularizer of such subjects. Poetry I have left until the last because it has been something of a bugbear in my editorial life. I may as well confess that I read almost no poetry from inclination, although I recognize its place in the literature of the world and would not for anything bar it from any Utopia I could conceive. For this reason, knowing that other people have a wholly justifiable liking for poetry, and due to a sense of my own “blind spot,” I have been led into the weakness of including too many books of poetry in the pocket series. At one time I had nearly a hundred different volumes of poetry in print.... No publisher needs to be told that poetry is not a commercial literary commodity except in a very few exceptional cases. The old masters do very well in gift editions, textbooks, and the like. So I find that there is every reason to keep in print Little Blue Book anthologies of Best Poems of John Keats, Best Poems of Robert Burns, Best Poems of Walt Whitman, etc. But it is not true that contemporary poetry is salable in mass quantities just because it is poetry. Today’s Poetry is fair as a general compilation. But it was necessary to call John Davidson’s volume Ballad of a Passionate Nun, and Other Poems to make it earn its place in the list. I have found it wise, too, to pick out a well-known title, like Thanatopsis or The One Hoss Shay, to feature on the cover of the book and in the advertising. But the general conclusion from my experience with poetry is that the audience for poetry in America is still greatly in need of broad and hearty development. While discussing titles, I should give some answer to the question sometimes put to me whether the length of a title makes any difference. I am not able to give figures to bear out any of my opinions on this point, and I can only present my own ideas — though these ideas are born, even if unconsciously, from constant experience with the publishing and selling of Little Blue Books. There are, too, some definite strictures determined by the nature of the Little Blue Books themselves, and by mechanical limitations as well as advertising costs. First of all, I state flatly that there is a great deal of nonsense in the notion that brevity is the soul of wit or anything else. In naming certain commodities, such as cigarettes, an attempt has been made to use a short name that will easily roll off the tongue. Thus, “Camel” was decided upon, no doubt, with the idea that the man who wants a package of Camels will step into the shop and say one word: “Camels.” That is highly theoretical, and anyone knows it is not proved by what actually hap-

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pens. The man goes in and delivers a lengthy speech something like this: “I want a package of Camels,” or, “Give me a pack of Camels,” or “Fork over some Camels.” The human animal is incapable of being so brief and wordless as to merely say: “Camels.” As applied to books, it is necessary to consider other things. If the book is going to be given plenty of advertising space the title does not make so much difference. Descriptive phrases, catchwords, slogans, sales talk, and so on, can be plastered all over the advertising and even on the jacket of the book. The title sinks into obscurity, except when ordering the book or asking for it in a bookshop. Even then the purchaser is likely to use some advertising phrase in lieu of the title, and the clerk who handles the order is expected to be up on his stuff sufficiently to interpret the customer’s jargon and get the right book for him with the least possible delay. I recall a case in point from my own experience. By stuffing circulars in outgoing packages of Little Blue Books listing some carefully selected clothbound books, usually picket to appeal to readers of Little Blue Books, I sell a surprising number of more expensive books in the run of a year. Havelock Ellis, the recent biography by Isaac Goldberg, was one of these — especially since Goldberg is known to Little Blue Book readers. On the circular advertising this book, however, the headline was used: “The man who debunked sex!” Beneath this catchline the title of the book and the author were given in large type — but the name Havelock Ellis, without explanation, meant little to many people. Several orders came in for the book entitled The Man Who Debunked Sex! Now to me that is a better title for the book than the man’s name. But it can never be decided once and for all that a short title or a long title is best. It is seldom a question of length. The real difference is one of appeal — of what the title tells, of whether it gives a clear idea of the nature and contents of the book. As I have said, if there is space to add a description of the book, the title matters much less than if the book must be sold by its title and author alone. I think of Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy. Here is a title in three words, or with the definite article, four. This book could have a shorter title, for it could be called Philosophy. Yet the difference between the short and the long title is not one of words: the longer one clearly is better because it suggests a continuous, interesting narrative (story). To go to the other extreme, this book could have a longer title, for it could be called A Comprehensive Survey of Various Systems of Philosophy from Antiquity to the Present. Here, the difference is again not one of words: the shorter title is better because it avoids any suggestion of pedantry, and emphasizes that philosophy as a whole has a story behind it which can be told in a fascinating and informative way. The effectiveness of titles cannot be measured with a yardstick!

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As for the Little Blue Books, the cost of advertising per agate line (the space occupied by a line of agate or 5 1/2 point type [14 lines to an inch] set a column wide, the unit of measure in advertising space) has always been an important consideration. Now there are 1,260 Little Blue Book titles. If all these are listed in one advertisement, and each book is allotted one agate line, for the listing along 1,260 agate lines are required! In this case the titles of the books in this advertisement are automatically limited to the number of words that can be set in agate type a column wide. The wording must be chose to fit the space and at the same time to describe the book persuasively so that it will be bought. Brevity is valuable as a characteristic only when it is more effective than something longer. There is Fannie Hurst’s story called T.B. This is all right if the book is listed under Fiction, but what does it tell in a numerical list if someone does not know the name Fannie Hurst? It may suggest that the book is a medical treatise. But this, I may point out, is the shortest title in the present list of Little Blue Books, and I cannot say that its brevity is of any merit. I am of the opinion that a much better title could be found for this story. There is room for housecleaning in the matter of titles. The whole atmosphere of titling is shrouded with cobwebs of myth and convention and what might be called superstition. On the one hand it is told that Shakespeare had a great contempt for titles — calling one of his plays As You Like It, and another Twelfth Night, or What You Will. On the other hand, some of Shakespeare’s titles are very apt, as A Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Moor of Venice are strongly descriptive and distinctive. Authors seem to take pride in writing things without titles and then casting about with loud wailing and painful moaning for a title that will fit. Other writers hit upon some pretty group of words which catches their fancy, or some title with a symbolic or metaphorical implication — to cite a blatant example, Harold Bell Wright’s The Mine with the Iron Door. Such titles are handles, well enough. They serve for identification and do very nicely for listing in the huge card indexes of public libraries. But if they had to sell the books they caption they would, most of them, fail pitifully. I have indicated many of my conclusions — the lessons I have learned — from my experimentation with titles. I pointed out that there are magical words like Truth, Life, Love, How to, Facts You Should Know, etc. I think I have made it clear that titles with hazy poetic haloes will not work, and that titles which state the plain facts about a book are in almost all cases the best. In general, my own rules for titling a book are few, but they are much to the point. Particular books often demand particular treatment, but there are one or two

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lessons of general application that I have learned at some cost, and that I am glad to pass on to others for whatever they may be worth. For even though a book will have a large and lurid blurb, and plenty of bolstering with advertising space, I see no harm in giving it a title which will carry it alone if necessary. If the title does describe the book it will help to eliminate confusion in the minds of prospective readers, and clarify for them just the book they may decide to buy. In that last sentence is my first rule: Make the title describe the book. The title should contain some dominant word which clearly indicates the subject of the book. If it is biography or criticism, I think the title should also indicate what the man stood for or what the matter criticized chiefly represents. If human nature can be put into the title, well and good. Every effort should be made to tie up the book with real life, or with the average person’s desire for romance, adventure, and fun. My second rule is: Make the title as distinctive as possible, so as to compel attention and awaken interest. I subordinate this to the descriptive requirement. But I have a notion that many publishers put my second rule first — they seem to prefer the bizarre and startling to the suggestive and revealing. But by putting this first it is necessary to add the descriptive on the flap of the jacket or in the body of the advertisement. I cannot do this, so I am obliged to consider the description of the first importance, and distinction second. In a series such as the Little Blue Books, description can be given first importance for another reason. Any publisher is aware that there is a constant demand for certain books of information, education, and such. That is to say, there is a fairly constant interest in a manual of Parliamentary law, and her the title is descriptive only. It is not necessary for it to be distinctive, since any attempt to distinguish this Little Blue Book manual from other manuals is obviously superfluous — the distinction lies in the fact that this is a Little Blue Book for five cents, whereas the others are bigger books costing much more money. The first rule only is necessary in titling such books. As a final word, I might hint in a loud whisper: take a leaf out of the page of the movie-titler’s ritual. Titles of books and stories are nearly always changed for the motion picture version — due undoubtedly to the necessity to make a much wider appeal. Allow me to ignore the merits of the photoplays themselves, and cite two of the titles as examples. John Barrymore began work on François Villon, but this was released under the much more popular title of The Beloved Rogue. Or consider that other Barrymore film, from Antoine François Prevost’s Manon Lescaut (which would have been a total failure as a movie title), which was called When a Man Loves. Considered merely as titles, these are both more descriptive and distinctive than the originals. •

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Mark Twain: Radical by Emanuel Julius First published in The International Socialist Review [Chicago], Aug. 1910, pp. 83-88.

NE August evening in 1908 it was the pleasure of my life to spend a few hours with Mark Twain. We leisurely strolled along the beautiful roads that lead to the Pocantico Hills overlooking the placid Hudson. While walking towards the hills we spoke only a word now and then. The sun was sinking in the west and flashed a shaft of red fire over the river that dazzled us with its splendor. Presently we reached the highest point of the hill we were climbing. The view that stretched before us was indeed magnificent. Below us we could see the village of Tarrytown. Directly opposite, on the western shore, was the village Nyack. The exertion of the last hour had tired us so we sat down on a huge stone. Twain immediately became more talkative. The expression on his face was one of

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seriousness. “Young man,” said he, “I wish to thank you for not having expected me to tell you a whole lot of jokes. I appreciate that very much.” The look on my face must have told him I did not understand for he added, “You see, it’s very bad to make my living by making people laugh. Then, when they meet me they always look for jokes, for something funny; and if I don’t supply it they shake their heads, go away, and tell their friends, ‘the old man’s getting older.’” Twain told me what I already knew — that he was serious minded. To me it seems terrible to even think of telling people I am serious. To say something seriously and have people giggle and think you are joking is a tragedy indeed! To me Twain is very humorous. But Twain’s humor is as the city man’s garden — merely a pastime — a side play. He is not a humorist but a philosopher, a thinker, a radical, a progressive, and an apostle of true democracy. I can no more look on Mark Twain as a humorist than I can on Lincoln as a rail splitter. Twain said humorous and witty things during his life but he did other things just as Lincoln did some things besides splitting rails. To be a philosopher usually means to be scorned and hated. But to be laughed at! What a pitiable paradox! It has been said that philosophers possess no sense of humor and when they do they cease to be philosophers. George Bernard Shaw said the following a few years past: “Mark Twain is by far the greatest American writer. I am speaking of him rather as a sociologist than as a humorist. Of course he is in very much the same position as myself — he has to put things in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang him think he is joking.” Shaw was right as was the journal Die Schöne Literatur when it recently said, “Although Mark Twain’s humor moves us to irresistible laughter, this is not the main point in his books; like all true humorists, is der Witz mit dem Weltschmerz verbunden, he is a witness to higher emotions, and his purpose is to expose bad morals and evil circumstances, in order to improve and ennoble mankind.” The Daily Chronicle [London] said editorially, after his death, that he had “The ironic gift of puzzling people and leaving them divided between seriousness and laughter.” This in a measure is true if the editor means some people, but if it signifies all

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people then I disagree. To illustrate how Twain was grossly misunderstood because he injected humor into his writings I will turn to his A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I look on this book as one of the strongest attacks on class privilege, aristocracy, and monarchy ever penned. A prominent critic read it through and then learnedly announced that placing a Yankee in an aristocrat’s court is certainly a very funny joke but four hundred pages of this joke was too much — a twenty page pamphlet would have been sufficient! All of Twain’s appeals for equality, democracy, denunciations of class privilege no more affected him than water a duck’s back. I must return to my conversation with Twain. “Did you ever read my book, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg?” asked Twain of me. I looked sheepish. “Come, come, that’s no crime. You know, about 15,000 books come out every year and a good many millions are in existence now, so don’t be ashamed to say you haven’t read some particular book. I’d be a fool if I expected you to have read every book I mention. “Well, people didn’t understand it. Thought it was one city or another. Didn’t know it was the model for the world; its people were the race. Might as well have asked Plato if his Republic was Baltimore or Chicago. “But I had one critic who understood me and that was my daughter Susy. She knew me and never looked for jokes.” I believe it would be well to quote little Susie. What follows was written when she was but fourteen years of age: “He is known to the public as a humorist, but he has much more in him that is earnest than that is humorous.... “His Prince and the Pauper is his most original and best production; it shows the most of any of his books what kind of pictures are in his mind, usually. Not that the pictures of England in the Sixteenth Century and the adventures of a little prince and pauper are the kind of things he mainly thinks about, but that that book and those pictures represent the train of thought and imagination he would likely to be thinking of today, tomorrow, or next day, more nearly than those given in Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn.”

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“It is so yet,” Mark Twain once said on reading this opinion more than a score of years later when the child was dead. Continuing, Susie wrote: “When we are alone nine times out of ten he talks about some very earnest subject, (with and occasional joke thrown in), and he a good deal more often talks upon such subjects than the other kind. “He is as much a philosopher as anything, I think. I think he could have done a great deal in this direction if he had studied while young, for he seems to enjoy reasoning out things, no matter what; in a great many such directions he has greater ability than in the gifts which made him famous.” Mark Twain always felt that this little critic knew him. Commenting he said long afterwards, “Two years after she passed out of my life I wrote a philosophy. Of the three persons who have seen the manuscript only one understood it, and all three condemned it. If she could have read it she also would have condemned it, possibly — probably, in fact — but she would have understood it.” Little Susie’s love for The Prince and the Pauper above all others may have been due greatly to her few years but the book teaches a beautiful lesson — a lesson of democracy — equality. Here we have a prince and a pauper — they change clothes and places and things go gliding on without a hitch. Clothes did

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but separate them! Princes are also made of the common clay of ordinary mortals! Twain’s democracy knew no conservatism, cant, nor conventionality. His views on institutions were revolutionary. To him they were man-made, to be unmade by the maker. He looked on mere institutions as extraneous. “They are its (the country’s) mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from Winter, disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags — that is a loyalty of unreason; it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, let monarchy keep it.” Every reform that made for progress found a ready friend and advocate in Mark Twain. Coming from the working class — of the West — the fertile field of true democracy, it is no wonder that Twain always thought of the public’s interest. His attacks on the looting missionaries in China and United States’ Philippine policy drew forth much criticism. He was advised not to desert his humor. Imbeciles! Little did they know that his humor was but a mask over his attacks on evils and injustices. Woman suffrage had Twain as a warm friend. Every woman — and every man, for that matter — should read Eve’s Diary. Its philosophy is delicious. Its moral is plain. Here we are taught woman’s tender influence on man — an influence for the best. Here Adam, during his life, only thinking of his superiority over her realizes, after hear death, that “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.” Twain nowhere preaches the doctrine of feminine superiority but every thought is permeated with the suggestion of where this superiority finds expression. On being asked if he favored the militant tactics of the British suffragists Mark Twain replied: “The cause of freedom cannot be won without vigorous fighting. Militant methods have appeared necessary to the women who have adopted them. These women have the interests of a great cause at stake, and I approve of their using any methods which they see fit for accomplishing the big results which they are fighting for. “You may use one method to carry a cause to victory. I may use another. Militant methods have appeared necessary in the fight of the suffragettes in many places where the cause finds its main supporters.” Mark Twain’s ever active, wonderful imagination made it possible for him to

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take what was seemingly a statistical fact and mould it into a word picture that would produce an incredible impression on the mind. For example, I will turn to his autobiography. Here Twain introduces statistics telling us that 10,000 persons are killed outright and 80,000 injured on the railroads of this country. But Twain does not stop here. Let him speak for himself: “I had a dream last night. It was an admirable dream what there was of it. “In it I saw a funeral procession; I saw it from a mountain peak; I saw it crawling along and curving here and there, serpent like, through a level, vast plain. “I seemed to see a hundred miles of the procession; but neither the beginning of it nor the end of it was within the limits of my vision. The procession was in ten divisions marked by a somber flag, and the whole represented ten years of our railway activities in accident line. “Each division was composed of 80,000 cripples, and was bearing its own year’s 10,000 mutilated corpses to the grave; in the aggregate 800,000 cripples, and 100,000 dead, drenched in blood.” In another part of his autobiography Mark Twain gives expression to his fear that America was rapidly traveling over the road that leads to monarchy. This he dreaded. Twain’s comment was based on a speech by Elihu Root. In his address Root stated that the centralization of government at Washington was effecting the elimination of state rights. To this Twain declared: “He did not say in so many words that we are proceeding in a steady march toward eventual and unavoidable replacement of the Republic by monarchy, but I suppose he was aware that this is the case. He notes the several steps, the customary steps, which in all ages have led to the consolidation of loose and scattered governmental forces into formidable centralizations of authority, but he stops there, and doesn’t add up the sum. “Human nature being what it is, I suppose we must expect to drift into monarchy by and by.... We are all alike, we human beings; and in our blood and bone...we carry the seeds out of which monarchies and aristocracies are grown; worship of gauds, titles, distinctions, power. “We have to be despised by somebody whom we regard as above us, or we are not happy; we have to have somebody to worship and envy, or we cannot be content. “In America we manifest this in all the ancient and customary ways. In public we scoff at titles and hereditary privilege; but privately we hanker after them, and when we get a chance we buy them for cash and a daughter.

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“And when we get them the whole nation publicly chaffs and scoffs — and privately envies — and also is proud of the honor which has been conferred upon us. We run over our list of titled purchases every now and then in the newspapers, and discuss them and caress them, and are thankful and happy. “Like all other nations, we worship money and the possessors of it — they being our aristocracy and we have to have one. We like to read about rich people in the papers; the papers know it, and they do their best to keep this appetite liberally fed. They even leave out a football bull fight now and then to get room for all the particulars of how, according to display heading, ‘Rich Woman Fell Down Cellar — Not Hurt.’ “The falling down the cellar is of no interest to us when the woman is not rich; but no rich woman can fall down cellar without we yearn to know all about it and wish it was us.... “I suppose we must expect that unavoidable and irresistible circumstances will gradually take away the power of the States and concentrate them in the central Government, and that the Republic will then repeat the history of all time and become a monarchy, but I believe that if we obstruct these encroachments and steadily resist them the monarchy can be postponed for a good while yet.” Of all Twain’s books I have read I believe his few lines in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court on the French Revolution are the most striking. Here he shows himself capable of disregarding the so-called teachers and professors of our day; examining that great cataclysm in its true light and expressing himself in sympathy with the oppressed, suffering millions instead of a handful of “nobles.” Here are his words: “Why, it was like reading about France and the French before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood; a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery, the like of which was not to be mated but in Hell. “There were two ‘Reigns of Terror,’ if we would but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions, but our shudders are for the ‘horrors’ of the minor terror, the momentary Terror, so to

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speak, whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared by lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? “A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror — that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror — which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.” One more quotation and I conclude. Here I wish to add an excerpt that portrays a phase of Twain other than that of a Democrat. In the Connecticut Yankee he expresses himself as follows on heredity and the environment: “Training — training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly, there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us. “All that is originally in us, and therefore creditable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam — clam or grasshopper or monkey — from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed. “And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly ME; the rest may land in Sheol and welcome for all I care.” Nothing is so easy as to speak for the future. Nothing is so dangerous. I will not attempt to measure the position history will accord Twain. Will it view him as a Democrat of the highest order? Possibly. But Twain’s strength lies in the work he did in portraying characters of a past age. The Middle West of the ’fifties produced types that were purely her own. Twain caught them in his net and gave them to us in books. Books that are of life never die. When types and the conditions that produced them are no more then the writer who recorded their characteristics and designs becomes an historian. He then becomes indispensable, and whether the future will or no he must live. •

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Secretary-Treasurer’s Report (as of 7/31/04) new members F- 1 F- 2 F- 3 F- 4 F- 5 F- 6 F- 7 F- 8 F- 9 F-10 F-11 F-12 F-13 F-14 F-15 F-16 F-17 F-18

David Williams • 9115 S Damen Avenue • Chicago, IL 60620 Tim Davenport • 5010 NW Shasta Avenue • Corvallis, OR 97330 Jake Gibbs • 220 Delmar Avenue • Lexington, KY 40508 Faye Landskov • 4716-C --- 97th Avenue W • University Place, WA 98466 John DeForest • 2792 State Route 12B • Deansboro, NY 13328 Melanie Brown • 127 W 26th Street #11 • Minneapolis, MN 55404 William Pitt Palmer • P.O. Box 41622 • Casuarina, NT 0811 — AUSTRALIA Angela & Doug Haldeman • #21 Upper Dardenne Farms • St. Charles, MO 63304 Lee Kirk • P.O. Box 5432 • Eugene, OR 97405 John Kishbaugh • 192 Thomas Road • Berwick, PA 18603 Mark Andersen • 6343 W Waveland Avenue • Chicago, IL 60634 Jack G. Hill • 2908 Elm Hill Pike • Nashville, TN 37214 Michael H. Hoeflich • 1535 W 15th (School of Law, Green Hall) • Lawrence, KS 66045 Paul Mann • 135 Windsor Place • Brooklyn, NY 11215 Richard D. Hess • 821 Albright Avenue • Johnstown, PA 15905 Jerry Billings • 6605 SE 36th Avenue • Portland, OR 97202 Lorne Bair • 2621 Daniel Terrace • Winchester, VA 22601 Paul c/o Antiquariaat Fokas Holthuis • Postbus 18604 • 2502EP Den Haag — NL

financial activity Previous Balance ............................................................ $ 0.00 revenue Dues Payments Received Cash Donations expenditures Postage Printing eBay Fees (advertising)

$ 174.00 $ 0.00 $ 32.37 $ 0.00 $ 0.00

New Balance ............................................................... $ 141.63 Notes: There are $17.87 in unused stamps on hand. Printing, eBay fees, and some of the organization’s postage expense is being donated by the Editor for 2004.

Addenda and Corrections to the Little Blue Book Handlist 0092-A. should be Hutchinson: Hypnotism Made Plain. [1920] 0092-B. should be Shipley: Hypnotism Made Plain. [1924] 0367-B is Smith/DeQuincey: How to Improve Your Conversation. [1927] 0446-B is McCabe: The Psychology of Religion. [1927] 0677-B Russell: What Can a Free Man Worship is attributed to “circa 1927.” 0789-B Eagin: A Digest of US Marriage and Divorce Laws is also “circa 1927.” 1366-B Haldeman-Julius: How to Become a Blue Book Writer is actually “circa 1931.” The following published previously published circa dates are now positively identified: LBB 0159-B [1921]; 1192 [1927]; 1250-1258 inclusive [1927]; 1260 [1927]; 1332 [1929]; 1334 [1929]; 1360 [1929]; 1378 [1929]; 1385 [1929]. The total count of types of Little Blue Books stands at 2127.

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The Bulletin Board THE PRINTS & THE PAPER sells used and rare books, photographs, and other paper ephemera. See our catalog of Little Blue Books at www.kirksbooks.com Click on “Collectible Series” in the specialties list. We have many more titles not listed! Will buy in our specialties — email for wants. [email protected]

WANTED — A copy of The First Hundred Million by EHJ. Will buy or trade Little Blue Books. [email protected] LORNE BAIR RARE BOOKS • 2621 Daniel Terrace • Winchester, VA 22601

Radical Books, Pamphlets...Ephemera. 4 Catalogs Per Year. Active buyer of fine individual items and collections in all areas of American social history. Happy to assist in collection development — send me your want lists!

Phone (540) 665-0855 • [email protected] FOUR LITTLE BLUE BOOKS WANTED!!! 1695 — Coleman: Pioneers of Socialism; 1706 — Hillquit/Fine: Practical Accomplishments of Socialism; 1707 — Laidler: Practical Program of Socialism; 1708 — Hillquit: Political Philosophy of Socialism. Worth eight or ten bucks a pop to me or a really good trade. Thanks! Tim Davenport: [email protected]

NAME YOUR PRICE!!! Wanted to buy — Little Blue Books 1901, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908,1909, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915. Faye Landskov • [email protected]

GET YOUR COLLECTING BUDDIES TO JOIN HJCC! It only costs $10 a year — people joining after the start of the year get ALL the issues of Big Blue Newsletter published during that year. SEE THE BACK COVER OF THIS ISSUE FOR MORE INFORMATION!

IT’S YOUR FREE AD SPACE, WHY DON’T YOU USE IT? All members of HJCC are entitled to a free 50 word ad in every single issue of Big Blue Newsletter! Email your ad copy for the next issue today: [email protected]

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Haldeman-Julius c o l l e c t o r s

c l u b

Annual dues for 2004 are $10. HJCC members will receive all issues of Big Blue Newsletter published during the year. HJCC members are entitled to a free 50 word ad in every issue of the newsletter. Please make your check payable to the organization’s provisional Secretary-Treasurer:

Faye Landskov 4716-C — 97th Avenue W University Place, WA 98466

2004 Q-III • First Printing = 50 • Website: http://members.aol.com/hjclub