Advertising is more and more bending this way. Why couldn’t we have seen it before? For the same reason that we can’t all write plays like Shakespeare’s or compose Wagner’s operas. When two shoemakers, Smith and Jones, had little shops opposite each other, Smith’s chief idea of advertising was to tell what trash Jones was making, and Jones’s to assure people that nothing good could come out of Smith’s store. What was the result? The same that induced the darky to say after he had heard the political orators: “If bofe dese fellers tells de trufe, what a pair of rascals they must be!” The net effect was to put people’s minds on the worthlessness of the product, instead of its excellence. Nowadays Smith and Jones are getting together, even if they haven’t been gobbled up by the Trust, and are assuring people that shoes are good things to have--that we ought to wear more of them; more kinds and better quality. The result is to fix the public mind on the excellence of shoes and both Smith and Jones sell more of them than under the old method. The library is willing to boom shoes for you, and labor-saving machinery, and food-products, and textiles and seeds, and lighting and heating devices. It does this to some extent without your co-operation, by the books that it places on the shelves; but no one who knows will go to a book for up-to-date information of this sort. If you want a description of the very latest device for any purpose, go to the publicity material of the concern that makes it. We trust to you ad-men and your campaign for truth in advertising, that it is no fake. Here is where you can help us and help your clients by so doing. We stock every bit of good, informative publicity that we can find. We miss much of it. You can help us get it all. Your clients will get more publicity and better publicity for nothing than they have often bought for hundreds of dollars. Perhaps it is another effect of hysteresis that makes us afraid of anything that is offered free. You remember the story of the man who all day long, on a bet, offered sovereigns unsuccessfully in exchange for shillings on London Bridge. If we were allowed to charge for our privileges I believe we could turn ourselves into a money-making institution on this count of publicity alone. I believe that it would be profitable for publishers to pay us for putting their books on our shelves. If we charged for the space we are giving to trade catalogs, circulars and other publicity material the issuers, I am sure, would not wait for us to ask for what they print. We have been trying for several years to get framed pictures of St. Louis industries to hang in our Business and Industrial Room. If we had asked $50 per, for the privilege of using space on the walls of a public institution I am sure we could have had it. But since we offer that space absolutely free of charge--a sovereign for a shilling--we can’t get what we want.