The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918Various
History
The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918
Various
American periodicals
Obviously a great deal of education, moral as well as intellectual, and
even physical, is coming from the war, and it obviously comes in part
from an immensely increased amount of reading on informing subjects,
even in the newspapers. But the call for this reading contains a
farther, and relatively obscure, source of education worth thinking of.
We can no longer risk wasting our time, as it is to be feared most of us
have done, by picking up to read the first thing that strikes our fancy.
The greatly increased mass of material has forced upon us the habit of
selecting what we read. The usefulness and importance of that habit
hardly need dwelling upon to the constituency of this REVIEW.
_Heart-to-Heart Advertising_
I am all things to all advertisers. I like to submit myself to the
experiments of some alert young psychologist, in response to whose plan
(scientifically conceived, artfully presented), I greatly desire to eat,
to see, to hear, to know, to do, to possess, that which he brings to my
attention. Being a person trained to jejune classification, I
automatically pigeon-hole the "appeal," and my mind therefore offers to
advertisements a hospitable retreat under Ambition, or Culture, or
Physical development, or the Senses, or Vanity.
The last quality and the first are not always distinguishable, the one
from the other. When a page of insinuating text and startling
illustration assures me that the reading of a specified set of books
will enable me,--a person temperamentally shy and physically
inconspicuous--to convince judges and jurors, and to combine into a
glorious whole the abilities of St. Chrysostom, Abelard, Shylock, Daniel
Webster, and a Confederate veteran, I am disposed to feel that though
hitherto I have been unappreciated, it now rests with me (and the set of
books) to alter, even to change, the opinion of my personal public. I
glow, too, under the conviction that correspondence courses can
transform me into a trained nurse, an O. Henry, a Thomas Nast. My vanity
makes the conventional years of hospital service, or a "born" ability to
tell a story, or to caricature, seem superfluous in an equipment for
success. And I am sure I could raise wheat and apples in the north and
oranges and pecans in the south, even though I should bring to my
enterprise no capital, no experience, no commonsense.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account