The ordinary advertisement of a book, making a few flat assertions of the book’s extraordinary merit, has become pretty hopelessly conventionalized. The punch is gone from it, we rather fear forever. In all conscience, it is psychologically defective in that it tries to coerce attention and credence instead of trying to attract, fascinate or arouse the beholder. The advertiser is not different, essentially, from the public speaker. The public speaker who aims to compel attention by mere thundering or by extraordinary assertions has no chance against the speaker who amuses, interests, or agreeably piques his audience, who stirs his auditors’ curiosity or kindles their collective imagination. There is too little personality in the advertising of books, and when we say personality we mean, in most cases, the author’s personality. The bald and unconvincing recital of the opinion of the _Westminster Gazette_, that this is a book every Anglo-American should read, is as nothing compared with a few dozen words that could have been written of, or by, no man on earth except H. G. Wells. The internal factor of H. G. Wells’s novel _The Undying Fire_ is so big that it constitutes a sort of a least common multiple of the hopes, doubts and fears of hundreds of thousands of humans. A 100 per cent. sale of the book, under existing merchandising conditions, would be 400,000 copies, at the very least. It ought to be advertised in every national and religious weekly of 10,000 circulation or over in the United States, and in every periodical of that circulation reaching a rural audience. And it ought to be advertised, essentially, in this manner: SHALL MAN CURSE GOD AND DIE? _No! Job Answered_ NO! H. G. WELLS TELLS STRICKEN EUROPE _Read His New Short Novel, “The Undying Fire,” in Which He Holds Out the Hope that Men May Yet Unite to Organize the World and Save Mankind from Extinction_ Such an appeal to the hope, the aspiration, the unconquerable idealism of men everywhere, to the social instinct which has its roots in thousands of years of human history, cannot fail. 6 Books are wrongly advertised, as we have said, and they are inadequately advertised, by which we mean in too few places; and perhaps “insufficiently advertised” had been a more accurate phrase. It is correct and essential to advertise books in periodicals appealing wholly or partly to book readers. It is just as essential to recruit readers.