The Wit and Humor of America Volume III Part 11

Perkins pushed back his hat and brought his feet to the floor with a smack.

"Why the delay?" he queried, "time is money. Hand me something from your desk."

I looked in my pigeonholes and pulled from one a small ball of string.

Perkins took it in his hand and looked at it with great admiration.

"What is it?" he asked seriously.

"That," I said humoring him, for I knew something great would be evolved from his wonderful brain, "is a ball of red twine I bought at the ten-cent store. I bought it last Sat.u.r.day. It was sold to me by a freckled young lady in a white shirtwaist. I paid--"

"Stop!" Perkins cried, "what is it?"

I looked at the ball of twine curiously. I tried to see something remarkable in it. I couldn't. It remained a simple ball of red twine and I told Perkins so.

"The difference," declared Perkins, "between mediocrity and genius!

Mediocrity always sees red twine; genius sees a ball of Crimson Cord!"

He leaned back in his chair and looked at me triumphantly. He folded his arms as if he had settled the matter. His att.i.tude seemed to say that he had made a fortune for us. Suddenly he reached forward, and grasping my scissors, began snipping off small lengths of the twine.

"The Crimson Cord!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "What does it suggest?"

I told him that it suggested a parcel from the druggist's. I had often seen just such twine about a druggist's parcel.

Perkins sniffed disdainfully.

"Druggists?" he exclaimed with disgust. "Mystery! Blood! 'The Crimson Cord.' Daggers! Murder! Strangling! Clues! 'The Crimson Cord'--"

He motioned wildly with his hands as if the possibilities of the phrase were quite beyond his power of expression.

"It sounds like a book," I suggested.

"Great!" cried Perkins. "A novel! The novel! Think of the words 'A Crimson Cord' in blood-red letters six feet high on a white ground!" He pulled his hat over his eyes and spread out his hands, and I think he shuddered.

"Think of 'A Crimson Cord,'" he muttered, "in blood-red letters on a ground of dead, sepulchral black, with a crimson cord writhing through them like a serpent."

He sat up suddenly and threw one hand in the air.

"Think," he cried, "of the words in black on white with a crimson cord drawn taut across the whole ad!"

He beamed upon me.

"The cover of the book," he said quite calmly, "will be white--virgin, spotless white--with black lettering, and the cord in crimson. With each copy we will give a crimson silk cord for a book-mark. Each copy will be done up in a white box and tied with crimson cord."

He closed his eyes and tilted his head upward.

"A thick book," he said, "with deckel edges and pictures by Christy.

No, pictures by Pyle. Deep, mysterious pictures! Shadows and gloom! And wide, wide margins. And a gloomy foreword. One fifty per copy, at all booksellers."

Perkins opened his eyes and set his hat straight with a quick motion of his hand. He arose and pulled on his gloves.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"Contracts!" he said. "Contracts for advertising! We must boom 'The Crimson Cord.' We must boom her big!"

He went out and closed the door. Presently, when I supposed him well on the way down town, he opened the door and inserted his head.

"Gilt tops," he announced. "One million copies the first impression!"

And then he was gone.

II

A week later Chicago and the greater part of the United States was placarded with "The Crimson Cord." Perkins did his work thoroughly and well, and great was the interest in the mysterious t.i.tle. It was an old dodge, but a good one. Nothing appeared on the advertis.e.m.e.nts but the mere t.i.tle. No word as to what "The Crimson Cord" was. Perkins merely announced the words and left them to rankle in the reader's mind, and as a natural consequence each new advertis.e.m.e.nt served to excite new interest.

When we made our contracts for magazine advertising--and we took a full page in every worthy magazine--the publishers were at a loss to cla.s.sify the advertis.e.m.e.nt, and it sometimes appeared among the breakfast foods, and sometimes sandwiched in between the automobiles and the hot water heaters. Only one publication placed it among the books.

But it was all good advertising, and Perkins was a busy man. He racked his inventive brain for new methods of placing the t.i.tle before the public. In fact so busy was he at his labor of introducing the t.i.tle that he quite forgot the book itself.

One day he came to the office with a small, rectangular package. He unwrapped it in his customary enthusiastic manner, and set on my desk a cigar box bound in the style he had selected for the binding of "The Crimson Cord." It was then I spoke of the advisability of having something to the book besides the cover and a boom.

"Perkins," I said, "don't you think it is about time we got hold of the novel--the reading, the words?"

For a moment he seemed stunned. It was clear that he had quite forgotten that book-buyers like to have a little reading matter in their books.

But he was only dismayed for a moment.

"Tut!" he cried presently. "All in good time! The novel is easy.

Anything will do. I'm no literary man. I don't read a book in a year.

You get the novel."

"But I don't read a book in five years!" I exclaimed. "I don't know anything about books. I don't know where to get a novel."

"Advertise!" he exclaimed. "Advertise! You can get anything, from an ap.r.o.n to an ancestor, if you advertise for it. Offer a prize--offer a thousand dollars for the best novel. There must be thousands of novels not in use."

Perkins was right. I advertised as he suggested and learned that there were thousands of novels not in use. They came to us by basketfuls and cartloads. We had novels of all kinds--historical and hysterical, humorous and numerous, but particularly numerous. You would be surprised to learn how many ready-made novels can be had on short notice. It beats quick lunch. And most of them are equally indigestible.

I read one or two but I was no judge of novels. Perkins suggested that we draw lots to see which we should use.

It really made little difference what the story was about. "The Crimson Cord" fits almost any kind of a book. It is a nice, non-committal sort of t.i.tle, and might mean the guilt that bound two sinners, or the tie of affection that binds lovers, or a blood relationship, or it might be a mystification t.i.tle with nothing in the book about it.

But the choice settled itself. One morning a ma.n.u.script arrived that was tied with a piece of red twine, and we chose that one for good luck because of the twine. Perkins said that was a sufficient excuse for the t.i.tle, too. We would publish the book anonymously, and let it be known that the only clue to the writer was the crimson cord with which the ma.n.u.script was tied when we received it. It would be a first-cla.s.s advertis.e.m.e.nt.

Perkins, however, was not much interested in the story, and he left me to settle the details. I wrote to the author asking him to call, and he turned out to be a young woman.

Our interview was rather shy. I was a little doubtful about the proper way to talk to a real author, being purely a Chicagoan myself, and I had an idea that while my usual vocabulary was good enough for business purposes it might be too easy-going to impress a literary person properly, and in trying to talk up to her standard I had to be very careful in my choice of words. No publisher likes to have his authors think he is weak in the grammar line.

Miss Rosa Belle Vincent, however, was quite as fl.u.s.tered as I was. She seemed ill-at-ease and anxious to get away, which I supposed was because she had not often conversed with publishers who paid a thousand dollars cash in advance for a ma.n.u.script.

She was not at all what I had thought an author would look like. She didn't even wear gla.s.ses. If I had met her on the street I should have said: "There goes a pretty flip stenographer." She was that kind--big picture hat and high pompadour.