England -- Fiction; Patent medicines -- Marketing -- Fiction; Pharmaceutical industry -- Fiction; Satire; Science fiction
So I made my peace with my uncle, and we set out upon this bright
enterprise of selling slightly injurious rubbish at
one-and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a bottle, including the
Government stamp. We made Tono-Bungay hum! It brought us wealth,
influence, respect, the confidence of endless people. All that my uncle
promised me proved truth and understatement; Tono-Bungay carried me to
freedoms and powers that no life of scientific research, no passionate
service of humanity could ever have given me....
It was my uncle’s genius that did it. No doubt he needed me,—I was, I
will admit, his indispensable right hand; but his was the brain to
conceive. He wrote every advertisement; some of them even he sketched.
You must remember that his were the days before the Time took to
enterprise and the vociferous hawking of that antiquated
_Encyclopædia_. That alluring, button-holing,
let-me-just-tell-you-quite-soberly-something-you-ought-to-know style of
newspaper advertisement, with every now and then a convulsive jump of
some attractive phrase into capitals, was then almost a novelty. “Many
people who are MODERATELY well think they are QUITE well,” was one of
his early efforts. The jerks in capitals were, “DO NOT NEED DRUGS OR
MEDICINE,” and “SIMPLY A PROPER REGIMEN TO GET YOU IN TONE.” One was
warned against the chemist or druggist who pushed “much-advertised
nostrums” on one’s attention. That trash did more harm than good. The
thing needed was regimen—and Tono-Bungay!
Very early, too, was that bright little quarter column, at least it was
usually a quarter column in the evening papers: “HILARITY—Tono-Bungay.
Like Mountain Air in the Veins.” The penetrating trio of questions:
“Are you bored with your Business? Are you bored with your Dinner. Are
you bored with your Wife?”—that, too, was in our Gower Street days.
Both these we had in our first campaign when we worked London south
central, and west; and then, too, we had our first poster—the HEALTH,
BEAUTY, AND STRENGTH one. That was his design; I happen still to have
got by me the first sketch he made for it. I have reproduced it here
with one or two others to enable the reader to understand the mental
quality that initiated these familiar ornaments of London.
(The second one is about eighteen months later, the germ of the
well-known “Fog” poster; the third was designed for an influenza
epidemic, but never issued.)
These things were only incidental in my department. I had to polish
them up for the artist and arrange the business of printing and
distribution, and after my uncle had had a violent and needless quarrel
with the advertising manager of the _Daily Regulator_ about the amount
of display given to one of his happy thoughts, I also took up the
negotiations of advertisements for the press.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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